Actually, I'm not sure you get it. It's not about being big, it's about using a monopoly position in one field to gain entry to another.
If you're big but not a monopolist, and you do the exact same thing, then way less of a problem. Hence Apple could bundle Safari with iOS but Microsoft couldn't bundle IE with Windows XP in the exact same way.
I avoided the word "monopoly" for a reason. The internet isn't a finite natural resource, Google doesn't own it, there are other players in the field, and nothing stops new players fron entering.
You're also interpreting the word "big" perhaps too literally. In your example, Apple is not big in the sense I mean. Microsoft might be, but that doesn't mean I agree with the judgement against them.
If people like your product so much that 95% of the market uses it, I don't see the abuse.
> it's about using a monopoly position in one field to gain entry to another.
It's not about Google dominating the search market. It's about Google leveraging their dominant position on the search market to promote their comparison shopping service, which is a different product for different market.
Think of the competition laws as nerfing your ability to leverage domination of one market into immediate domination of other markets. Companies don't have natural rights, there are only the arbitrary rules of the market game, that are intended to promote general prosperity in the society.
The problem is not being big but the effect you have on the market. And that effect is naturally a lot bigger if you are a defacto monopoly ergo why there are a different set of rules. It can't be all party if you are at that position.
If you would not have that kind of control (and fines when they break those rules) it would be virtually impossible to beat these kind of entities or they can use their weight to strong-arm them-self in a lot of markets. See what happened in the past with Microsoft.
runaway free market ends with standard oil. regulators need to keep it within bounds where competition is possible. it's doubly important in the internet where geography doesn't matter most of the time and winner takes all pretty much globally, because there's no other option really.
Controversial way to look at this, but surprisingly close to the truth: markets exist for the people. Companies have only one purpose: to serve the people. Their profits are merely incidental. Any type of regulation (or lack thereof) can be traced back to this rule.
Freedoms exist only to let companies thrive insofar as that then lets them sell goods that benefit the people. Once that stops, the freedoms stop.
I'm being slightly dry cut, but this is a good rule of thumb when looking at society. It's easy to forget about the bigger picture and think that companies have any type of inherent right to exist. They don't. They're here for us. Of course, theory vs practice, yada yada. but again: rule of thumb for regulations.
Integration of services and software could best serve the people. Promotion may do so too, especially when it comes to software that relies on network effects.
If anything, punishing a big company for its potentially big effect on markets values 1) markets above people and 2) competitors' ability to participate on the market above the people.
Banning integration or self-promotion could very well result in a worse product overall that serves people worse.
The 3 statements you made here are completely illogical and foreign to me. Can you provide sources for why you believe this kind of monopoly is beneficial to the people?
For example this is my view and the view of most EU citizens:
"punishing a big company for its potentially big effect on markets values 1) people above markets and 2) competitors' ability to participate on the market which is to the benefit of costumers (people)"
> Companies have only one purpose: to serve the people.
That seems completely backwards. Governments have only one purpose—to serve the people.
Companies have only one purpose—to serve its shareholders. Of course, purely pursuing this purpose can lead to perverse outcomes so we have regulation to keep it in check.
> Companies [don't] have any type of inherent right to exist
Huh? In so far as individuals have a right to engage in trade and commerce, and in so far as they have a right to engage in this in coordination with other individuals, companies do have a right to exist.
And they do. I can't see how google makes that impossible for competitors, also as there are many other big player's around.
And it is allways hard to get big from being small.
This is more about politics and EU bragging itself, for doing something "fair", for the people.
And they do. I can't see how google makes that impossible for competitors, also as there are many other big player's around.
And it is allways hard to get big from being small.
This is more about politics and EU bragging itself, for doing something "fair", for the people.
Winning means end of the game. Hence the game doesn't allow anyone to win - because what the society needs is not the players to win, but for the game to go on and players to play.
Somewhat related: I'm finding that the prevailing wisdom about conglomerates being a failed experiment is being put to the test and found wanting by Amazon, which has (over the course of the new century) transformed itself into an aggregate of concerns with no obvious interrelation.
there's one obvious and it's logistics. amazon is all about optimizing the supply chain from the factory to the consumer door (or back yard in case of drone delivery. only half joking here :))
The game has rules that keeps it broadly beneficial.
You win by being the natural favorite of users' free choice of exchange, not by eradicating the ability of others to compete. We need more penalties like this for those usurping the concept of the market.
Captialism is a carrot-on-a-stick engine for generating prosperity. The carrot is the wealth and glory of winning. You outcompete all other players, you're the only game in town, you get to set the rules.
Except the carrot is only dangling on the stick and as a donkey, you're not allowed to ever get it - because the moment you do, you stop moving forward. Hence it's imperative to a) convince people they can win, and b) ensure they don't. Because it's not the players that are socially useful, but the game itself.
According to this [0], which was the press release for Intel's fine, it gets taken off the EU central budget so the member states pay less net. The EU budget is ~145bn EUR I believe.
I actually feel it's misleading and wrong at a very fundamental level; this was the only thing I disagreed with in the whole press release!
Consumers "pay" for Google's services by giving ads attention so the ads have value and Google can sell them.
All the data harvesting is a means to a end: to make the ads more appealing so you'll click. Google don't profit from the data directly; in fact all the data harvesting and processing is a significant cost factor. There are certainly other businesses that resell data and profit directly from data harvesting, but AFAIK, Google is not really one of them.
It's a bit like saying that you pay a café by letting them observe you while you sit in their chairs. A basic misunderstanding of what's actually going on.
But in order to make the advertising business very profitable (this is, in order to give a reason for other businesses to use Google Ads to advertise themselves), Google needs to know all about you: who you are, where you are, what you like, what you don't like, what you like at certain times, what are your needs, etc, etc.
The real value of advertising is in showing the right advertisement at the right time at the right person.
Personal data is to advertisement what sugar is to candy.
Your analogy with the café is very misguided and not related at all with the situation.
It's still a means to an end. You don't pay with your data, you "pay" by interacting with ads.
Consider that Google actually became super profitable well before all the detailed tracking started. You grossly underestimate the synergy of "people searching for products" and "displaying ads". Everything else is an optimization.
You're describing Facebook... which is no where near as profitable as Google, in spite of much more invasive tracking.
If you never click an ad and use an adblocker so you never even see them, your traffic and your data just cost Google money. They may be able to extract some small amount of value by observing your behaviour and using those insights to improve their products, but they don't make any money until someone pays for an ad.
I agree the café analogy isn't perfect. I was just pointing out that outsiders who don't understand what's going on may fundamentally misunderstand the transaction. You can still provide value to the café by sitting in their chairs if you liven up the place and give them feedback on how to make the place nicer.
But if customers never buy anything, the café goes broke. And people stop interacting with ads on Google, Google does too.
You are wrong that by stating that if we don't click on ads or use adblockers we are costing money to Google.
Even if you don't use the ads or if simply ignore them, you still represent a group of interests that can be used to feed and train the machine.
Google learns through the searches you make and through the videos you watch and your behaviour will be used to improve the accuracy of ads shown to other people. That's your payment for using Google's services.
The only reason people stop interacting with ads it's because ads don't bring any real value, And any data that Google might collect brings up that value a lot.
I think you underestimate a lot of the number of people unaware of Google's presence and influence when it comes to advertisement. This number is much bigger than the number of people who install adblock on their browser.
Also you can't adblock paid top ranked search result so even if you don't click, and even if you know it's an ad, you've seen the brand in the top result, and the brand pay Google for that.
Neither of us knows this, so we may as well stop arguing about it. What we do know, is that running the servers and hiring all those engineers costs money, and their revenue is almost entirely ads.
I don't think it's a stretch to assert that users that engage with and click on ads are much more valuable to Google than users that don't.
Whether the users that do neither contribute positively or negatively to the bottom line is an interesting question. I suspect they're a net negative, but obviously you disagree.
Google themselves probably know the answer, but I doubt they're telling...
Aside: a supporting data-point for my gut feeling here is that AdSense has always contributed much, much less to Google's revenue than AdWords does. The difference between the two gives a clear indication of how capturing user intent (searching for products) completely dominates how valuable (=effective) the ads are, and is much more important than all the other tracking combined. Google could probably turn off all the tracking and still make tons of money. Some numbers are here: http://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/020515/busine...
No it's not so you will click it. They collect the data from customers and offer it to the advertisers. The data is a big part of the product they sell to advertisers: targeting advertising. They don't sell user clicks (why would anyone pay for that?), they sell targeted advertising.
Advertisers quite literally pay for clicks. That was part of how Google disrupted the market back in the day; most other advertising networks were selling "impressions", but Google was so confident in the relevance of their ads that you got impressions for free and only paid when a customer actually clicked on it.
The click is worth paying for, because it is a signal that the user has seen the ad, thought about the ad, and is interested in the ad. Advertising gold.
Obviously Google have many products (they bought Doubleclick an "impressions" company), and there are analytics value-ads and all sorts of things. But the core of their business is still pay-per-click advertising.
Your idea that advertisers are buying raw data is a misunderstanding.
The "pay for click" is how they sell their product to advertisers. But advertisers do not pay for clicks. A click is worthless. They pay because they know that their adverts are being shown to the right people and there's a guarantee there in the "pay for click" thing. In order for Google to actually get those clicks, it must show them to the right people, and it does that by targeting.
Google sells targeted advertising, not clicks. Nobody pays for clicks. I do not think advertisers are buying raw data. I think they are buying advertising which is targeted based on that raw data.
In pay-for-click, advertisers are paying for advertising which is effective. The click is how that is measured.
There are other ways to measure effectiveness, but measuring clicks is simple and reliable. No matter how you do it, advertisers ultimately want to pay for ads that work and lead to sales.
Everything else is a means to an end, targeting in particular. Ineffective advertising is a worthless waste of money, no matter how well targeted it is. Untargeted advertising which leads to sales on the other hand, is very valuable.
So sure, advertisers will prefer targeted advertising. But that's because they expect it will work better than the alternative. What matters to them is whether it works, not how.
To the general public the how is critical though. If there was less tracking and spying and data harvesting we'd all be better off. So it's very important to squash the misunderstanding that tracking and targeting itself has intrinsic value for anyone. For society (and for the ad networks), tracking has a significant cost and is in many ways a significant liability. For advertisers it's a tool in their toolbox, and if we could replace it with a more benign one, that'd be good for everyone.
This is part of a whole debate which you find by searching for "personal data as counter-performance". For example:
> The German Minister for Interior, Thomas de Maizière, has voiced many of the concerns of Member States over the concept of “private ownership of data” and the risk this might entail for consumer privacy. Minister de Maiziere cautions, “If I can sell ‘my’ data, there is a danger of privacy being up for sale. Then at some point, only the wealthy will be able to afford to opt out, while the economically weaker are effectively forced to put ‘their’ data up for sale”. The DCD proposal also conflicts with the rights and remedies detailed in the UK’s Consumer Rights Act, which become invalidated when consumers exchange personal data in return for access to digital content. While the UK government has stated that it has “no fundamental objection” to applying these rights to situations where consumers exchange personal data for access to ‘free’ digital content, it has also said these rights could “unduly inhibit” that “very innovative business model”. Most recently, Giovanni Buttarelli (EDPS) published an Opinion on the Commission’s proposal, warning that “individuals should not be required to disclose personal data in ‘payment’ for an online service”.
it's both plain and false. consumers pay with their money, not "data". google gets this money from advertisers. consumers pay even if they never used google in their whole life.
Not sure I get the logic here. Will they be fined next for showing the Google Maps embed (and street view) when you search for places nearby? What's the difference?
The funny thing is that Google Maps is even worse than the shopping comparison IMO. But I think the shopping thing got traction as a few competitors bundled their forces and sued them.
I like it and hope that Google will stop promoting their services without listing alternatives for lots of things that they promote on the search page (Google Maps, Android, Chrome, Youtube, ...). See 'other cases' in the document that could be next potential steps (ads, Android)
My hope is that they provide an opt-in method to bundle in google services.
I want google maps, youtube, shopping links, and largely view the search as a portal to the google platform. Removing this is removing a feature customers and the company wants, because other companies want to compete on individual products that may or may not be better while google is providing a platform with products you want integrated to simplify your life.
I'll take simplicity, trust and reliability over a dozen disconnected services from different companies that I don't know what their motives are. I know googles motives, and as a user of their platform otherwise this service is exactly what I want.
Ultimately my argument is if another company came along and did the exact same thing from the start (integrated platform with search etc...) no one would have an issue. the "Issue" is apparently google's existing search dominance. This is why i think it should be opt-in for users, and by default off. I don't think google is wrong for offering the service to users who want it, competitors have to provide a benefit or product that is so clearly better it offsets the benefits of a more integrated platform. That's the market/competition, not the EU's role.
Ah, yes. Sure, opt-in would be fine too. And yes, competitors should fight, not just trust the government :), but the problem is exactly like you say: Google search is too dominant and they use this dominance to advertise their (not always better) services.
The preferred solution of the EU would be that there would be a standardized API between search engines and map providers, shopping providers, etc, and you could simply choose which map provider you'd want, and that'd be shown in every search engine.
This is still being discussed, of course, as no solution has been found yet, but in general the idea is based on Android's Intent system, where this concept works quite well.
How would Google differentiate between a search and an address without having the Maps product deeply integrated ? Sure they could identify the address and then render the map using say Apple Maps. But what if Apple Maps didn't understand the address or if their API implementation didn't match up.
Seems like it would very much hurt the overall experience.
That sounds horrible though. Another abomination in the making. The effort to align all those map providers is probably quite significant. Such a massive waste of efforts and engineering time.
I don't think so. Google is actually in a perfect position to do that. They could just unilaterally announce they'll support other map providers if they conform to a specified Google API, and guess what, map providers will do it, forced simply by power of competition.
So if Spotify creates a music recognition feature that competes with Shazam, would they need to create an API that allows you to choose your music recognition service from within Spotify? This a very slippery slope!
Spotify is close to the 50 or 75% threshold. So would they also need to include Shazam's advertisements within their own app? Cause otherwise Shazam would still fail. I'm not understanding how this can work practically.
Probably not. Someone using Spotify and their hypothetical music recognition service is more like someone using Google Search and Gmail which isn't a problem. This is more like is someone would search Spotify and artists from their own record label (or promotion company) were at the top of the search results.
It's exactly the same logic as the Microsoft antitrust case.
Microsoft had a dominant position in operating systems. Then they developed a web browser, and rather than compete against other web browsers, simply bundled it into the operating system. This meant they got an instant dominant position in web browsers. But they didn't get it by being better than other web browsers, they got it by being just good enough that people wouldn't bother going to the effort of evaluating other options, since their browser came with the operating system. This effectively ended the competitive market for web browsers.
Google has a dominant position in search. Then they developed a lot of other products and services, and rather than compete against other companies offering those products/services, they simply pushed their own versions to the top of search-result pages. This meant they could get an instant dominant position in the other markets. But not by being better than competitors; they could get it by being just good enough that people wouldn't bother going to the effort of tracking down other options, since Google's version was right there in front of them already. This could effectively end the competitive market for many types of products and services.
Any time a company uses a dominant position in one market to subvert or outright end competition in another market, that's bad. And in many places, including the US and the EU, is also illegal.
Unjust enrichment of disgusting bureaucrats. In this case, google did nothing wrong other than display what they want on their own site, and for that they have to pay their hard earned money to an undemocratic authoritarian commission. No thanks.
Yeah, no. The fine is not paid to any commission, it goes to the EU budget and is taken off from the amount member states (hence, citizens) have to pay for that year.
Companies are free to do (or not) business wherever they want; they must follow the rules and regulations. We just have stronger laws and regulations about monopolies in Europe and apparently Google is ignoring them. Then it has to be fined to comply the rules as it makes sense.
A similar thing is going on with the food. We have a more strict regulation, and there was some talks about deregulating it to do more business with USA; however this would in practical terms mean lowering the quality of our food. Of course everyone complained! The same is going on with the internet.
So Google should have the right if they want show the results they prefer and hide or push on 10th page results that may affect their profits?
As an example say I have a very popular source code hosting or email service, so popular that is on top search results on all other search engine but in Google search is hidden intentionally, that seems fair to you and not an abuse of a search service to promote unrelated products?
Would it be still be fair if Google would have deals like pay me X and you will be on front page, pay me Y and your competitor is not on front page, it is Google service so they can show anything they want.
"Survival of the fittest" does not scale to society level. The EU tries to regulate the market to allow more participants to profit from it.
This strive for a less divided population is probably a reason why right-wing populist (or "undemocratic authoritarian") parties don't appeal to a majority in EU countries.
The press release is well written. It explains why Google is fined in an easy way to understand, covering most aspects; what is the problematic behavior, why it is considered as problematic, which data lead to this decision, etc, whilst not painting the company in a negative light.
Opinions on the decision will sure differ among readers, but I think the decision is in place with the majority of EU citizens' consensus.
At this point they are also apparently abusing their capcha. You use it from Firefox, solve like 3 different captcha, my most recent experience with Cloudflare. Use it from Chrome, instant check after failing a login. And it's from the same IP that has done it over and over again. If you were the least bit intelligent you would not do this... unless you were trying to make the user experience of other browsers worse than yours by abusing a commonly offered service that you offer for free. Going forward this is worrying for other Google services as well and their cloud offering. Are they going to add a delay in responding to certain browsers, I dunno. Maybe there is a reasonable explanation, I dunno
I guess they assume, if you're actually loading from Chrome, you're probably not a bot? They're probably checking for more than just a simple user agent?
That said, as far as I know (I'll keep an eye on it), I haven't always received an instant check in Chrome when dealing with a captcha.
They do a lot of profiling. Like if you're logged into a google account at the time, and other session checks. Perhaps your browsers had different cookies/localStorage, which could explain it.
Say that this is true. Google can only use its own data from its own browser to improve the web and penalizes everyone who is not using their browser. The result is the same. Google has a monopoly on your experience of the web... because it is optimized for users of its browser.
> Say that this is true. Google can only use its own data from its own browser to improve the web and penalizes everyone who is not using their browser.
No, it also works on other browsers. I know because I exclusively use Safari and I encounter this one-click-captcha thing regularly.
The thing is it only works on browsers you use regularly. It looks like they are analysing/tracking the behaviour of your browser (using google ads and other assets embedded in web pages) and determine if your browsing behaviour matches that of a human.
Okay say that this is true, then if you want any sort of decent user experience you MUST let Google track you and analyze your behavior. So many ways for Google to win. So many ways for the user to lose. I do run a bunch of stuff on my Firefox to prevent that, perhaps that's a reasonable explanation as to why.
Google owns the server, Google owns the client, Google owns DNS, Google owns domains, Google even owns > 50% of mobile. It's way too much ownership under one roof.
Yes that is pretty much the entire idea. If you don't let them track you, they don't have a reasonable assurance that you're a real legit non-malicious human being. So you get to fill out the actual captcha.
Pretty sweet deal, yeah? 99% of the population gets an easy checkbox, and all the people who care just need to fill out some questions to prove they're not a bot. It's not like you're blocked from using the form.
99% of the population. Last time checked significant portion of the population uses various tools including ad-blockers, and other privacy tools to decrease their online foot print. So that point is wholly incorrect. You mean significant portion of the population who does not mind being tracked constantly by Google. Most likely the most unsavy masses. Not anyone that cares about their privacy.
I use an adblocker and various other privacy tool (uMatrix user here). I still get one-click checkbox most of the time. I'm logged into my google account.
> Last time checked significant portion of the population uses various tools including ad-blockers, and other privacy tools to decrease their online foot print.
Oh, I'm sorry, I misread that title as "up to", because I viewed it right after a slightly older headline saying "IAB Study Says 26% of Desktop Users Turn On Ad Blockers". So go with 26% as a possibly-high number. I very much doubt the number is under 10%. It's a lot of people.
It isn't always a "just fill out some questions" issue; some of the captas they show are essentially impossible for humans. The one Google service I can't avoid (well, maps also but I can't reember a problem there) is Google Scholar and I occasionally get the almost impossible captchas there (I think I got one out of at least six I tried on different occasions). Logging in avoids the issue (and tends to fix it for a while without logging in... I think an IP address range thing in my case).
The worst part is when you need to prove to Google who you are when already logged in to a (non-Google) online store that you have purchased from previously. That is just rediculous and seems to be getting more common. At least those are not impossible, but still. I do not know if Google has anything to do with promoting that use but if they do they should be held responsible for that (as well as the businesses that use such things).
Yes, you must. Or you will encounter the normal annoying captcha like I do and I don't complain because it's my own decision to not be tracked and I know there are consequences for profiling and live with it.
You can't have your cake and eat it too, either you are for privacy and should expect the hassles this create or you want the convenience and have to pay with your privacy for it.
I don't really understand why are you pressing so much on this issue, you have choices with tradeoffs, as most things in life.
I don't really understand why are you pressing so much on this issue
You're acting like these are immutable laws of the universe rather than properties of google's design decisions.
I think your point wouldn't encounter as much resistance (or at least different resistance) if you just said something to the effect of "devoply, you're in the X% of users that google tolerates providing a sub-standard experience to, and I don't give a fuck either."
You don't have to use Google services. Or Google client. Or Google DNS. Or Google domains. Even with adblocker, and on third-party websites I still get one click captcha. I get that you see a single company taking over a lot of infrastructure, but the captcha is probably not the great example.
Last time I tried to login to namecheap with firefox I got like 5 captcha checks (select all tiles with signs) and ended up with the annoying one that says "click on the tiles until you don't see any more cars", the annoying part with that was that it took AGES until the new images appeared. When I tried the audio thing it said "we are sorry but you computer is sending up automated network requests" or something like that.
When I tried again with chromium it got instantly verified.
I came to say exactly that. That's a very well written statement that clarifies the situation more than any news outlet I happened to read on the case.
As for the decision, it may seem unfair for Google, but the European commission has to look at the bigger picture: its search dominance is so big that it gives Google an unfair advantage when competing in other business sectors, driving others out of competition even if they have a much better product. That's not good for society in the long run
Google's search results have become more than just a directory of websites like it was in previous years.
It now integrates tons of specialized results such as embedded videos and smart answers to direct questions. It will only move further and further away from simple lists of sites as their AI improves.
I fear this fine will deter innovation here as any special results Google adds will be scrutinized heavily. It's also very possible the complex data they need for it's 'smart' results aren't available by integrating with other 3rd party services (at least not initially), which is likely why Google even created these competing services in the first place.
If Google was merely a Yellow Pages style service as it was previously then I'd be more sympathetic to the idea of distorted rankings favouring Google services but that's becoming less and less the typical user experience.
>If Google was merely a Yellow Pages style service as it was previously then I'd be more sympathetic to the idea of distorted rankings favouring Google services but that's becoming less and less the typical user experience.
Well, I'm primarily agains the idea of giving a single, non democratically controlled non-international entity, so much power.
To the point where I don't care if Google is forced to stop innovating in being a "one stop shop" for the internet if that means more distributed sources and more distributed (even if lower quality and with fewer resources) innovation.
Sometimes, when it comes to society, it's best to have less technology more uniformly distributed than a single source of highly advanced technology.
Do you think an organization like EU can effectively fine or regulate their way to a more uniform market though?
Google could partner with other companies to do integration in their search engine for those smart results but then they'd just be giving another company an unfair advantage.
I don't see how you could stop this without crippling the type of answers Google provides. Besides maybe offering open tools they could automously integrate with.
Google pushed for adding metadata so any web developer can add things like star ratings and pricing directly to SERPs. But the adoption has been limited and limited compared to a full custom integration with a web service they control.
But regardless Google is a monopoly that we can't really do much about. Plenty of people have tried to compete and failed so there will be some consequences of that.
Considering how important the tool is to the world I'm quite the opposite. I'd rather let Google have a few specialized subsites which they can dominate a few markets with ease, in exchange for not severely limiting the potential of their technology - a technology we are all stuck using for the foreseeable future.
> But regardless Google is a monopoly that we can't really do much about. Plenty of people have tried to compete and failed so there will be some consequences of that.
The fine is focused on Google Shopping. I'd say the biggest competitors are Amazon and eBay.
While I'm unsure if the EU can effectively do something about Google as a search engine monopoly, I'm pretty sure Google can be beaten in the e-commerce sector.
Step by step, down the giants. Claiming the resolution of the matter in a single step is unrealistic.
> Step by step, down the giants. Claiming the resolution of the matter in a single step is unrealistic.
My concern is that even one step like the fine here will significantly chill their innovation with their search service in every category. As they will see adding any special advanced listings in search results as a big risk of being fined.
We're stuck with this giant so I'm not sure why you want to down it when there won't be comparable alternatives popping up in it's place.
This isn't just Google shopping being pushed further down the results ranking but how the shopping subsite is deeply integrated into the search results.
Which is why I said the proposed solution is regressing search engines back to simple directories which harms customers for some neglible gain for other small companies.
I guess we have very different concepts about innovation. First and foremost the term “service” as posed here seems too broad: in the years Google decided to change and extend what the given service is.
Exploiting your existing user base, in order to get traction for your next service, that in your opinion gives an added value, is not what I’d call innovation. If your new product or service is really innovative, then you don’t need this kind of tricks to get traction, users will come to you (because of the added value your new service gives to them).
The early Google was innovative, and won over the other search engines because of that.
If you are not able to get traction without this, then what you call innovation is not innovative, and you’re overestimating your product. For me (and apparently for the eu commission too), the rest is simple propaganda. Some find comfortable to believe it, probably because it’s profitable for them.
I don’t know what is the climate inside Google, but if this is able to significantly chill their “innovation”, then I think that they’re simply waiting for the next big thing in tech.
I actually found Google way better before it had all these integrated advanced features. It was technically never a "directory" though (like Yahoo ... Categories, or something?), it was a web search engine.
And it really sucks at web search today, compared to before (~10-15 years ago).
This is personal opinion of course but your argument depends on all this innovation always being an improvement to society. But Google innovates to improve its profits, which sometimes aligns with public interest, and sometimes not.
If it doesn't necessarily improve things for society, why would a company have a right to innovate despite everything else? Especially if you have to weigh it against the abuse of market dominance power to stifle competition (also deterring innovation, btw).
Well, Google is a dominant market force, even if it is dominant because it is simply that useful so that everybody has to use it.
Because of that dominance, it deserves, no, requires scrutiny much, much more than not being deterred innovation. The latter is a "nice thing", the former is a necessity. Sorry but if you're that big, that dominant, of course we're going to scrutinize your responsibilities. If that's going to mean less fancy features, sad but so be it, the alternative is letting Google abuse all that power unchecked!
Decisions, decisions. Is this Vestagers works again?
I'm more interested in seeing how much of her work will actually hold up in court. Better to focus on 10 good cases, than spread yourself thin on 30 and lose 80% of them. I guess she'll be long gone by then. The joys of politics.
Take the money Google made by breaking the law and give it to non-profit foundations which are dedicated to developing free/libre alternatives to Google services.
This will kill two birds with one stone--firstly it will correct the economic damage Google has caused by abusing their monopoly position. Secondly it will make it harder for them to maintain and abuse their monopoly in the future.
The software industry today is filled with companies who seek to establish a monopoly so that they can extract monopoly rents. This behavior almost always skirts the boundaries of legality, and it's getting worse. Companies are being created with the explicit business model of throwing huge sums of money at illegal activity in order to establish market dominance--see Uber.
Monopolies are not good for markets and this belief is already reflected in our antitrust laws. We need to give those laws some teeth and come up with creative solutions that don't just punish bad behavior, but also encourage competition.
*> Take the money [...] give it to non-profit foundations
Even better: Make Google pay them directly. I don't know if that is possible on European level, but here in Germany, fines are often paid directly from the criminal to the non-profit, which is usually chosen in a round-robin-like fashion from the local non-profits in the criminal's (or court's) region.
They had a net income of 23 Billion Dollars in 2016, so the one-time fine alone is approx. 10% of their net income last year. The daily fine of 5% of daily worldwide revenue would amount to approx. 20% of their daily worldwide net income (using the 90 Billion from Wikipedia as worldwide revenue and 23 Billion as net income).
Since the EU is likely more than just 10%/20% of their income, they still make some money here, but I doubt that it was worth it for Froogle…
I tend to agree with the underlying judgment, yet the record-breaking fine seems disproportionate to the debatable degree of wrongdoing, compared to the Intel case, where the (obviously reprehensible) extortion of distributors etc. only led to a fine of about €1.06B.
The fines aren't made up arbitrary numbers, and the article is clear on that too.
"In accordance with the Commission's 2006 Guidelines on fines (see press release and MEMO), the fine has been calculated on the basis of the value of Google's revenue from its comparison shopping service in the 13 EEA countries concerned."
Business is what is stopping Google from not servicing Europe. Google makes huge part of its profit on search in Europe and pays almost no tax in Europe.
If Google stopped servicing Europe, one or more European competitors would emerge in days or weeks and Google's dominance would be threatened worldwide within months. It would be a completely suicidal move.
What are you taking about? Any Google Search competitor needs to be seriously better than google in order to stand a chance, ‘not 100% there’ is equivalent to not there at all.
Moreover Qwant is just bing search results repackaged.
I think the more "complex" the EU tries to make it in order to extract money from big corps the harder it can also be for smaller firms if those rules apply to those also.
You're acting like the outcome of this decision was in any way predictable based on the "rules of the EU". If I owned a website that had a search engine and comparison shopping and email, I would not expect that it's somehow wrong if my search engine shows results from my service's comparison shopping and email. I would not expect that it's somehow my obligation to seek out comparison shopping services operated by my competitors and show them on the search engine in the same way as my company's product. There isn't even a general way to do that -
am I obligated to design a custom protocol? This is borderline ridiculous, but is apparently the ruling.
What precedent is there for imposing rules this this on other businesses? "You have to design new technology and build custom services that show business information for your competitors on your advertising/websites/properties"?
> You're acting like the outcome of this decision was in any way predictable based on the "rules of the EU"
Yes it was [0].
> If I owned a website that had a search engine and comparison shopping and email, I would not expect that it's somehow wrong if my search engine shows results from my service's comparison shopping and email
If your search engine had a dominant position in the EU market and if you used that dominance to put your shopping product above other competitors', then yes, it would not only be wrong, but also illegal.
You're acting like the outcome of this decision was in any way predictable based on the "rules of the EU"
It was. There are specific requirements in Article 102 about abusing dominant market positions to "apply…dissimilar conditions to equivalent transactions with other trading parties, thereby placing them at a competitive disadvantage".
If I owned a website that had a search engine and comparison shopping and email, I would not expect that it's somehow wrong if my search engine shows results from my service's comparison shopping and email.
If you owned a massive market-dominating service, then your team of corporate lawyers should expect that.
"You have to design new technology and build custom services that show business information for your competitors on your advertising/websites/properties"?
That's not what happened though – the specific instruction is:
the Decision orders Google to comply with the simple principle of giving equal treatment to rival comparison shopping services and its own service
That's all, and it is not unreasonable to impose these terms of a market dominating force that has used that dominance to crowd out competition.
What precedent is there for imposing rules this this on other businesses?
It'll get factored as a cost of business. If the cost of business exceeds the benefit, then they'll close down their EU operations. Otherwise, it sucks they're not making as much money as they want/should, but they're making enough to continue for now. The fine is both large enough and small enough that it probably won't act as much of a deterrent but rather an incentive to more closely study EU rules to see what more they can/can't get away with, and whether they can use any of their knowledge against potential competitors to stomp them out.
The EU economy is bigger than that of the US and Google's position in EU is more dominant. Bing doesn't work well for Europeans, there are no real competitors. Maybe the US market has more marketing spending, compared to Europe.
My guess would be that Google makes about the same in the EU as it does in the US.
It is not just the revenue they make from EU. Closing the shop in Europe would leave the market for somebody else. With such a large market left for others, some competitor could gain significant momentum and threaten Google's position in US and other places as well.
AMP isn't bad in the sense that it makes websites faster. AMP is bad because it (usually, in common practice) switches the domain, so you lose control of a huge number of things and you essentially cede control to a third party, so instead of this:
Now ironically, this is actually safer for a number of websites because it has the side effect of making normal HTTP content HTTPS, but the idea of Google taking over control over the content, the advertising, what methods are used for analytics tracking, and what possible pieces of content can be embedded destroys the whole "the web should be free" concept.
It's not something dramatically new, Facebook started doing it years ago and even Google news was a (more limited) form of it, but just because some things are possible doesn't mean they should be done. For example I can make a website, example.com, where every link gets turned into
example.com/v/yourwebsite.com
And then proxy all the content through my server replacing links like yourwebsite.com/login to example.com/v/yourwebsite.com/login and the majority of users will not notice that the website hasn't changed. And really the only thing that stops people from doing this is copyright law and a shared societal understanding that corporations should be able to control their content, not technical countermeasures.
Theoretically you could of course host your own AMP server, but of course if you're going to have your, say, mobile subdomain you can just as easily make things fast by just sticking to plain old HTML and simple CSS. In reality what happens is that companies trade control for speed on mobile.
I'm so scared of relying on one company for everything.
I personally run my own mail server and use Mail to move all messages to Google Inbox, so that I can use Google's excellent spam filter and email grouping while still keeping control over my email.
I use both Google Photos and iCloud Photos.
If I had to have Google proxy my website, I would at least give my visitors a CNAME instead of Google's URL, to avoid getting locked in into the technology.
I know a lot of people that would be totally screwed if Google closed their account for some reason: no more email, contacts, photos, etc. etc.
But as far as I understand, AMP is just an open technology, i.e. open for any (search) company to implement. Google is just the company proposing the standard (and coincidentally benefiting most from it).
Proposing the standard sure, but importantly, prominently displaying it in search results.
If an AMP equivalent standard came out by Mozilla or Microsoft or Facebook, it would be an uphill task for them to get google to give those pages special treatment in search results.
Hence, there is an argument to be made about AMP being an anti-competitive (search engine dominance used to push it's own diet-html).
I'm not sure if the actual format is relevant in a court of law, as long as anybody is capable of producing the format.
For example, Google is already favoring HTML above, say, TXT pages. Demanding TXT to be shown as high as HTML in search results doesn't make much sense.
AMP is open to implement (or copy) for anybody with Google-scale datacenters, not for any company.
From the official site: "The Google AMP Cache is a proxy-based content delivery network for delivering all valid AMP documents."
In other words, you are welcome to tie yourself to Google infrastructure, not merely to a proprietary software platform that you can at least use on your own (like Windows etc. in the Microsoft antitrust cases).
AMP is not a technological advancement: sites are perfectly able to serve lean web pages from their own server. AMP is a rather important brick in a wall of monopoly.
What would Google have to do to ignore this fine? If they cut any physical presence in the EU, would the EC have any way to enforce this fine?
Put another way, if the EU tried to take money from some random e.g. American or Japanese company without a physical presence in the EU, what channels could the EU use to twist their arm across national boundaries?
Somewhat related, there could be good money in providing an explicitly non-hostile legal environment for companies, where they won't get in trouble for e.g. promoting their own services or offering services for free [1].
Google as assets in the EU, and Google has liabilities with EU banks.
The EU could simply seize Google's servers and intellectual property, and sell it to fund this.
Additionally, if you'd create a jurisdiction just to avoid the law, you can expect that no country will protect your copyright. You'd have the EU courts support every person stealing your IP.
You really don't want to pick a fight with a legal system that your entire business depends on.
Google could remove any presence they had in the EU, at huge expense (closing Google Dublin, abandoning all EU revenue); but that would also remove their ability to use Ireland and the Netherlands as tax havens. They'd have to submit to the US tax system instead.
The US is already much of the way towards that non-hostile legal environment, which as you can see in many comments here is making many people very sure the EU is doing the right thing.
Yawn... Google isn't going to give up a double-digit percentage of their market to indulge these sorts of nationalistic revenge fantasies.
The EU has strong legal institutions, and is a democracy ruled by law, with standards at least as good as the US.
They aren't any more hostile to businesses than the US, which has basically identical antitrust laws. Find the list of EU antitrust actions, and you'll see they take actions against EU companies far more often than companies from non-EU countries, almost perfectly aligned with representation in the EU market. You just don't hear about some Italian steel mill being fined in US media.
Please enlighten me: What kind of monopoly would that be?
Much as I detest an awful lot of Google, I have never once been - and know of noone else who has ever been - forced to use their search against my will. In fact, I get along fine without it, as well as without their analytics and their browser and their cloud stuff, excepting of course that I am often forced to correspond with gmail addresses.
Google holding a dominant position or a monopoly on search is not by itself illegal. However, using that position to gain entry in a different market (shopping, in this case) is considered anti-competitive and hence illegal.
No, I realise that. My question is how are they supposed to hold a monoply or dominance, when there is nothing but preference or lazyness stopping anyone from switching to a competing service?
A lot of time, research and money has gone into feeding those preferences and laziness. The patterns to create habit forming products are well known - even books about it http://amzn.to/1PU95Fp
There probably needs to a category of consumer software where the argument "but you could always use an alternative" should not apply, when evaluating monopolies. Once you have network effects for example, you have the foundations for a monopoly. WhatsApp is probably a monopoly by now, for example: if all you're friends are using it, you don't really have a choice, even though there are alternatives.
How the monopoly arises is irrelevant to the law. Even if it's just collective laziness, it is still illegal to use that monopoly to influence other markets.
I suggest you read the wiki article[1], it's actually very good at answering your question. The whole article is worth reading, not just the section I linked answering your specific question.
Dominance is reflected by the reality of market share, not by whether or not someone could theoretically switch search engine. In the EU they have a very dominant position (95% I think?).
It's no different from saying MS had an effective monopoly/dominance in the 2000s, even though you could theoretically install Linux.
It's no different from saying MS had an effective monopoly/dominance in the 2000s, even though you could theoretically install Linux
I not only could, I most certainly did.
The situation was different, though. Microsoft Windows had a kind of real monoply, since it was - and is - difficult to find a retail pc without the damned thing preinstalled and included in the price. No such mechanism exists concerning Google, as long as we politely keep Android out of the picture.
Mind you, my position back then was more or less the same with regard to EU vs MS as it is today, with Google taking over: I dislike both companies. I very much more intensely dislike the monolithic and terrifying EU throwing its weight around.
I very much more intensely dislike the monolithic and terrifying EU throwing its weight around.
why do you find the EU terrifying? (also, the EU is not exactly monolithic considering it is not a single entity in many areas, but that is another point entirely).
It's not just customer choice. They have all the classical barriers for entry for anyone trying to provide similar product quality. Even if someone manages to beat them temporarily, Google can compete with prices (of ads typically) so low that they can't make profits but Google can. They bleed out anyone trying to compete.
Economies of scale, network externalities and vertical and horizontal integration means that popular internet services are king of the hill type business. Bigger and larger translates to smaller cost per user, cheaper ads and higher quality. There can be only few really big players and they create natural barriers to entry for anyone else.
All classical barriers of entry apply to Google, FB, Amazon:
Agreed. If I search for a jacket, I'm using Google to price compare. If I want to use a different price comparison service, I'll google for price comparison sites instead.
So when Amazon decided to sell hardware, would that be anti-competitive?
Pretty much, you could use the argument you just made against any business that delved into another space. Apple with phones back in the day, Microsoft with Hardware, Walmart and groceries, etc etc etc. There are almost infinite examples, very few businesses haven't expanded their product line and reach. Using their own business to do so is just an obvious solution.
> So when Amazon decided to sell hardware, would that be anti-competitive?
Which monopoly does Amazon have that they're abusing to sell hardware?
> Pretty much, you could use the argument you just made against any business that delved into another space.
Nope; only businesses which are a monopoly.
Amazon has no monopoly, therefore the argument cannot be used against them. Plus nobody is stopping Google from opening a new website (e.g. GoogleShopCompare.com) and doing anything they want, using their huge brand and financial power, what they're saying is wrong is embedding it into their existing monopolistic property to give it an unfair advantage (Google.com).
It is exactly comparable to the Microsoft/Windows issues in the 1990s. Microsoft could sell/give away IE, they just couldn't bundle it with their monopoly (Windows) to give it an unfair advantage. Google previously got into trouble for exactly this due to Google Maps being bundled with Google.com.
Define monopoly, Google is the largest search engine, Amazon is the largest eretailer. Personally I don't think Google has a monopoly, as there are alternatives (a monopoly is supposed to be when their exist no competitors, not just when a business is so much better than everyone else that people choose to use them). Plus, switching search engines takes literally seconds.
Amazon used to only push other's products, now they push their own as well, often making use of their front page to do so. It's the same, if not worse, than what Google is doing.
The term "market domination" is actually the one under consideration with this ruling. Previous time this happening with Microsoft, they just happened to also be a monopoly.
"Market domination" is in fact defined in the article (and in more specific detail if you follow the links there).
It's not about users that _could_ do something else. It's about the fact that in reality 95% of all clicks as a result of a google search go to the top 3 results and 90% of all search in the affected countries goes through google.
Sure those users could use ddg but it's not about what users could do, the reality of the matter is that other comparative shopping sites depend(ed) on google and got cheated.
I don't think your argument that the company whose word has become so synonymous with internet search that you can look it up in the Oxford English dictionary is not a monopoly really holds much water. Pretty much everyone on the planet has been affected unless you won't be happy their dominance of this space is truly complete until the last hermit calls it day from his mountain view. You have chosen to eschew their services - I'll bet with some non-negligible degree of difficulty - but have forgotten that you are also affected passively by all the other people in the world googling - not for you now and not your services and so must be less prosperous for it. You are still affected by their dominance whether you use their services or not as they gain unlawful advantage over, and thereby affecting, all the other services you do use. I love the Google btw. The fine seems hefty and a bit like a shakedown but I'm sure they are not unduly worried.
That you're somewhat free to switch doesn't actually matter. But if it did, I'd point out that Google's customers are advertisers, and they do not have the freedom to switch easily, considering they are forced to go wherever their customers are.
As an American who wishes his government protected him as well as the EU is protecting their citizens, I kinda resent being grouped in here.
Google fans would like to make this about US vs. the EU, because it misdirects away from Google's illegal actions. But multiple US companies asked for and supported this investigation against Google. And I wish our government laid down the same charges against them here.
I just don't understand how surfacing affiliated ads over others on Google own sites is a big deal? They're a revenue generating service, of course they're going to favour ad networks and channels which benefit them the most financially. To fine a private business €2.4bn for conducting pretty standard business practices.
Surely as a user you'd view promoted shopping results in Google with a pinch of salt and look around first? I just don't agree that warrants a €2.4bn fine. Again, unless I've misunderstood the full picture
Sure, and I think they should also fine for a couple of thousands the evil people that are supporting that monopoly and making it possible, by using such sickening services Google provides.
Google giving an advantage to its shopping service is peanuts. The way Chrome was promoted (not only through search, but other Google services as well) is the real abuse.
Microsoft got hit with a huge fine because of IE. The reason Safari got off the hook eludes me, maybe because Apple doesn't have a monopoly on computer OS.
That's true. It's so annoying when I duck into Firefox for a minute while doing web development and Google yells at me to get me to install Chrome, even though I already use Chrome 99% of the time.
Hmm. The rules are a tad arbitrary. This would be entirely allowed if less people used Google search relative to its competitors.
Note, it's not illegal per se. It's not illegal because of a de jure monopoly. It's not even illegal because of the number of users they have. It's illegal because Bing, Yahoo et al are not as relatively successful.
It was the same with browsers. Microsoft were hit for bundling. Apple haven't been though they've done identically the same thing. Why? Because enough people bought Android phones in the EU.
I do find it dubious that, effectively, the primary criteria for illegality is not what the defendant did but what some other actors didn't do. Seems wrong to me.
The primary criteria is the damage it causes to society, there is absolutely nothing arbitrary about it. It just so happens that if you are not a (quasi-)monopoly, you just cannot cause the kind of damage a monopoly can, no matter how hard you try, and if you don't cause any damage, you won't be fined.
The thing is, personally I prefer getting integrated results from Google's other search services when I do a Google search. I like getting Google Maps results when I search for a location, I like getting Google Flights results etc. When I do a Google search I am not just using it as a simple website search. I want it to use it to search the whole Google suite of services. If they are forced to stop doing this it will make my search experience worse for me.
Random, maybe silly idea. Maybe they could start providing two search streams. One would just be a simpler website search while the other would be a more involved google services search as well as a general website search. This way search users could explicitly say that they want to see direct integrated results from the whole Google ecosystem.
> If they are forced to stop doing this it will make my search experience worse for me.
This seems to be the whole point of the fine. Currently Google's services just so damned conveniently integrated that no one uses competitors' services, even if they are better.
The thing is, though, I am totally with you here. I don't want to use one of the other services for maps, or flights, or these snippets for information. They are just search results for me. The integration is more important for me than ... better filtering, or whatnot. I can always go to one of those sites, but there really is no need, And frankly, it would really, really suck if I had to now.
Edit: From the text:
> Google has to apply the same processes and methods to position and display rival comparison shopping services in Google's search results pages as it gives to its own comparison shopping service.
What does that even mean? Right now Google has a link for Maps, Images, Shopping, Videos, ... in the top bar. Do they need to change it to Maps, Images, Shooping (Google), Shopping (Idealo), Shopping (yet another service), ...? Embedding results would not work. Have a link called Shopping that does not list results, but points to more shopping sites, maybe with the search term already preappended? Meh...
This is basically the EU protecting other corporations even if most of the populations benefit from Google's current practices. Corporatism at its worse.
I wouldn't be so sure if they benefit. Not every Google service which is pushed upwards by their tight integration is top notch.Also the better ones may have room for improvement and innovation which we might not see from a monopoly in a comfortable position.
If they didn't benefit, if using those services were a net loss, then people wouldn't be using them.
Also, I like to draw a line between monopolies imposed by force (eg taxi offering horrible services making competitors illegal through licensing) and those used by people voluntarily because they enjoy the services. Google is used voluntarily, because people enjoy it, like Microsoft during the 90's. As I read elsewhere, Microsoft lost relevance to tech because OSS took servers, web took applications and mobile took the client. Antitrust didn't do much.
With Google, the only thing the EU is doing right now is forcing Google to offer a lower quality service. What should make Google less useful should be innovators making them less relevant and ubiquitous like the web, OSS and mobile did to Microsoft. iOS and Siri already made Google Search much less relevant on mobile, I'm sure there will be more in the future. Monopolies used voluntarily usually don't last long unless they keep innovating, but if they do keep innovating then forcing them to offer lower quality services seems really bad and it doesn't motivate other people to out-innovate them if the government will just help make Google worse, we all lose. Innovation should be bottom up, not top down.
> If they didn't benefit, if using those services were a net loss, then people wouldn't be using them.
1. They may benefit more from better services. 2. As far as I know Google operates a lot of services which are not profitable by themselfs.
> Also, I like to draw a line between monopolies imposed by force (eg taxi offering horrible services making competitors illegal through licensing) and those used by people voluntarily because they enjoy the services. Google is used voluntarily, because people enjoy it, like Microsoft during the 90's.
Today a lot of people don't know of anything else. The search might even be used voluntarily by many but it's a major information gateway because of its dominance (it's more or less infrastructure). If this is used to cross market other services and even to make competitors harder to find it's a form of mild force. It's a bit like when (in the old days) the major phone company is founding a taxi service and offers you a taxi before calls to competitors are routed through and placing their own service way more prominent inside the phone book.
> iOS and Siri already made Google Search much less relevant on mobile, I'm sure there will be more in the future.
Maybe inside the relatively small Apple world. The mass uses Android where Google makes sure its services stay at the top of everything by forcing all or nothing contracts onto manufactures. They managed to make sure nothing is not an option for most.
> As I read elsewhere, Microsoft lost relevance to tech because OSS took servers, web took applications and mobile took the client.
Microsoft was never that dominant in the server space, Linux and co. mostly replaced the commercial unix offerings. They tried to use their client dominance to push their server OS forward by making it hard for competitors to be compatible, did not work out entirely (and they also got fined by the EU for that later). Web had to be taken from them first, this worked mostly because they got far too lazy with IE (and later a bit of help from, again the EU).
> Antitrust didn't do much.
Antitrust could do more but it is often too slow for the fast world of IT and it is often too weak.
> Monopolies used voluntarily usually don't last long unless they keep innovating,
Microsoft was dominant on the client for over a decade and still is in a lot of areas. It took a long time and a shift to new device categories to partly break that monopoly. And finally what happened is only a shift to a new dominant player called Google.
> unless they keep innovating, but if they do keep innovating then forcing them to offer lower quality services seems really bad and it doesn't motivate other people to out-innovate them if the government will just help make Google worse, we all lose. Innovation should be bottom up, not top down.
They have to innovate a lot less overall. Sure if they do absolutely nothing somebody may beat them regardless but if they do only as much as necessary to keep the friction high enough even innovative competitors are out of luck. Only exceptionally big innovations which are so different to even overwhelm the monopolist have a chance.
> 1. They may benefit more from better services. 2. As far as I know Google operates a lot of services which are not profitable by themselfs.
So what? Billion dollar companies subsidizing tech for the masses (even selfishly) is not a bad thing. That's one of the best thing about capitalism.
> It's a bit like when (in the old days) the major phone company
No, it's not like that, phone companies were granted monopolies by governments enforced by the law and force of the state. Google is not enforced by the use of government force or law, it's just pleasant to use and so people use it willingly, huge difference.
> this worked mostly because they got far too lazy with IE
You're proving my points, monopolies that are used willingly and not enforced by the government are forced to innovate to survive, if they don't people will check alternatives.
> Microsoft was dominant on the client for over a decade and still is in a lot of areas. It took a long time and a shift to new device categories to partly break that monopoly. And finally what happened is only a shift to a new dominant player called Google.
So a company had a great technology and marketshare that lasted ~15 years only, how is that something to worry about exactly? They had the best tech and grabbed the market until they didn't have the best tech. What's wrong exactly here? Google has the best Search right now and most of the market, if their tech starts lagging, they will lose their marketshare. Again, not seeing the issue here.
> Only exceptionally big innovations which are so different to even overwhelm the monopolist have a chance.
Again, that's exactly my point, trying to bring down monopolies by force only discourages/postpones exceptionally big innovations from happening. Also, Google itself was a huge innovation by itself, why is it a bad thing that only another huge innovation could beat them?
Erm, Microsoft lost it’s dominance in part because it too lost an anti-trust case. Are you saying you wish Microsoft had been powerful enough to stifle Google the way Google is now powerful enough to stifle its competitors? What’s another 15 years?
Nope. Microsoft was forced to discontinue its anti-competitive bundling tactics, which they otherwise would have used to throttle competition as they did with Netscape.
For that matter, Apple only exists today because of Microsoft’s investment, which was in part done only to keep their competitor alive so that they could claim not to have a complete monopoly.
Apple and Google’s products certainly were better, but they would have been crushed by anti-competitive practices if Microsoft had not already lost their antitrust case.
Sure, but the question is, where the line will be drawn.
A "Shopping" link next to "Maps" and "Images" is probably OK, but it's also completely useless. I'd be surprised if more than a fraction of people doing comparison shopping actually clicked that link.
Intentionally pushing down results of competitors via algorithmic criteria is obviously bad, but say they stopped doing that. What about the inline shopping box at the top of search results? That's still putting their own service in a prominent position. Probably bad...
... but then this concern immediately applies to translations, song lyrics, unit conversions, maps, shopping hours, etc. The kind of results that as a user I want to see. Will that be disallowed to? If so, this will make Google Search a significantly worse product.
I personally reckon that making Google Search a significantly worse product is part of the reason why this happened. One of the companies pushing for this is Ciao, a comparison shopping service owned by Microsoft and used to provide the equivalent feature for Bing search results. Microsoft clearly know how useful these kinds of contextual results are, because before Google had them they were promoting them as Bing's big advantage over Google. Now they've managed to get the EU to restrict Google's ability to compete by offering them.
>The kind of results that as a user I want to see. Will that be disallowed to? If so, this will make Google Search a significantly worse product.
From the article the issue is not that Google services appear in the search results, rather it is that they artificially make their own results appear first without regards to normal search algorithms.
"Google has abused this market dominance by giving its own comparison shopping service an illegal advantage. It gave prominent placement in its search results only to its own comparison shopping service, whilst demoting rival services."
I actually read it again. Maybe I misunderstand it, but for me it is about the Google shopping comparison service: "Google has abused its market dominance as a search engine by giving an illegal advantage to another Google product, its comparison shopping service." What that means was this: "When a consumer enters a query into the Google search engine in relation to which Google's comparison shopping service wants to show results, these are displayed at or near the top of the search results."
ow are they going to fix this now? Show five results, one of which is from Google, four from competitors? Which competitors? How bad can the results be, as long as they are returned by Google's request to their service? Can I exclude competitors? I don't want my data to go to Idealo, for example, I only have an account with Google.
I fear this is just opening a can of worms, becasue ultimately I am searching for something, go to a search engine for this, and want results. If I wanted results from a different search engine, I would have used that one. Now I get mixed results that I did not want to see. Is it really so bad that Google (the search engine) "understands" what I was probably really searching for and offers a specific type of search results - links to shops where I can buy SearchedProduct(tm)?
> Currently Google's services just so damned conveniently integrated that no one uses competitors' services, even if they are better.
Here's the thing: they're not really better, because they're not integrated. Google tools tend to suck in many different ways, but their integration usually more than makes up for it.
> The thing is, though, I am totally with you here. I don't want to use one of the other services for maps, or flights, or these snippets for information. They are just search results for me. The integration is more important for me than ... better filtering, or whatnot. I can always go to one of those sites, but there really is no need, And frankly, it would really, really suck if I had to now.
I feel the same way. I described this point further yesterday in AMP thread:
The problem too is that the competing services aren’t even that good. For example, if I search for a specific type of Miele oven from here in France, I can type the model number and Google gives me an array of choices from various stores it was awesome. If Google didn’t do that, then what results should it return? A bunch of other shopping sites on which I would do the exact same thing but not have the same quality of results? French comparison services just outright suck. The interfaces are barely a step up from Minitel.
I am definitely not a Google fanboy; I don’t like Android and I’m not big into their cloud apps, but when it comes to search, they are the best. EU companies could try and compete but they haven’t. Has any EU company tried to build a high quality search experience? If they aren’t succeeding then why?
The problem in France, as I see it is government. As an example, DailyMotion rivaled YouTube for a short time, as soon as DailyMotion was about to be acquired for a huge sum by Yahoo, the French government blocked the sale because Yahoo wasn’t French. That immediately sent a signal that if you put a lot of VC/investment into a French company, your exits were subject to the whims of a protectionist government bureaucracy, which makes investing in French companies relatively more risky than investing in American companies in terms of ROI.
Did the DailyMotion deal contribute to the current Google dominance? I think it definitely had a chilling effect on high growth unicorn chasing in the EU which means the “French Google” hasn’t been born because it is much much harder to access funding than a similarly positioned company in the US. I am not saying the French startup scene is dead or bad, but the ultra-high level moonshots that are fairly common in the US are extremely rare in France because of the bureaucratic environment. Blah Blah Car raises $200 million against a $1.6b valuation, but that is pretty much an outlier and likely the result of an investor play against Uber’s French difficulties.
My point: if the EU wants to prevent monopoly situations, member states ought to be doing more to get out of the way of innovation. They can do that by lowering taxes. Even if you have a winning investment in France, an investor gets butchered in capital gains taxes thus requiring a 10x investment to actually be a 25x investment to be worth it. With such a low hit rate for VCs in general what incentive do they have to kneecap themselves by investing in places like France?
I like getting results when I search, not necessarily Google ones. Google Flights/Hotels sucks, for example, I'd rather get Orbitz or Hotwire. Like how Google does it for Uber/Lyft when you pull up a Maps location.
As a counter, perhaps if it were more open & their shopping results had to compete with other providers in a fair way then your experience would be better. Right now they can be OK but simply more prominent and win.
Because it works for you, it doesn't mean it works for everyone else.
Of all Google's services I don't care about:
- Google Shopping, I never saw a reason to use it and I never did, I prefer to use local shops or Amazon
- Google Maps, I actually prefer Open Street Maps. The amount of detail on OSM is staggering and in many ways, I think the data is much more complete than Google Maps
- Google reviews about restaurants and businesses, I prefer to use TripAdvisor
- Google Books, I prefer using Amazon and Kobo Store
- Google Flights, I was never able to get anything useful out of this service. I usually use Momondo
As you can see, the only thing that is interesting to me about Google is the search engine and yet, it keeps throwing to my face all these services I don't use and that I don't care about.
On operating systems you set preferences for which service/program to open when a certain extension is clicked. Similarly Google should be forced to allow you to set your preferences through your browser, i.e. not forcing you to login, on where you want to go when you type certain types of queries, like for instance directions or products. That would improve competition and give other service providers at least a good chance of their services being used instead of Google. And keep the system more competitive. Then Google can go and claim that this is what their users actually prefer.
This could work through cookies that the browser always makes available to certain or all sites that indicate preferences of the user.
You could simply store an "anonymous" cookie. They already do it anyway for other settings. The first time I go on google on a new computer it asks me to review the privacy policy, it could also ask about those widgets.
>- Google Shopping, I never saw a reason to use it and I never did, I prefer to use local shops or Amazon
I use Google Shopping for price comparisons across mutliple retailers. (The service was originally named Froogle.) I originally used Pricewatch.com but switched to Froogle/GoogleShopping because it had better results.
Unfortunately, the local shops and Amazon don't offer the same breadth of comparisons. E.g. if I want to buy a new harddrive, Google Shopping tells me whether the lowest price is at Newegg, BHPhoto, or somewhere else.[1]
If there is a superior substitute to Google Shopping, I'd love to know about it.
Those websites are primarily american, so I am assuming you live in America. In Europe, I would say Google Shopping is more bothersome than it is useful. Whatever point you were trying to make by highlighting the usefulness of the service in your region, you forgot to take into account the rest of the world.
Besides, if you like to use Google Shopping, no one is stopping you.
>Besides, if you like to use Google Shopping, no one is stopping you.
I have no irrational loyalty to Google Shopping. I was genuinely asking for better price comparison alternatives. Not sure what prompted your petty sniping.
What's the superior European price comparison website you're using that should be ahead of Google Shopping results?
Interestingly, Google Shopping (when it was Froogle) used to be quite good - back when any eCommerce site could just send in the feed of their stock.
At some point they moved towards Google Checkout (Google Merchant/Wallet?) verification and the number of stores you could actually find with it dropped dramatically.
Now it's just high street retailers, a handful of the bigger online places and eBay. Not only is it not as useful, it's killed off the sites that came before it as they tried to adapt and survive.
Conversely, just because it doesn't work for you doesn't mean everyone else feels it's broken. At the same time Google was introducing the shopping results that the Commission says were illegal, Microsoft was running advertisements with the slogan "Bing and Decide" that advertised how great a feature it is to do essentially the same thing.
So even if you don't believe Google, there's at least some evidence that a lot of people actually do like services showing up.
>So even if you don't believe Google, there's at least some evidence that a lot of people actually do like services showing up.
Yes, and this is exactly what the decision entails, these services should be ranked on their own merit. Google shouldn't be allowed to artificially prioritize their services on searches but let them compete with others.
"It [Google] gave prominent placement in its search results only to its own comparison shopping service, whilst demoting rival services."
Anecdotal experience: I switched browsers on android because android's default browser kept opening map links in google map. Firefox mobile didn't seem to suffer from that issue.
While google's tight integration lead to a positive experience for you, it lead to a very poor experience for myself or others who want to use something not google. I'm not asking for the EUC to fine google, I'm asking for choice.
Not 100% but I thought that android asks you the first time you click on a maps/wiki etc link would you rather use browser or app and whether you want to do it once or always.
I agree with you that choice is good. That is kinda why I proposed my very simplistic solution of Google offering two ways of searching. One stream which tightly integrates with the Google Ecosystem which would be a plus for many people (like myself) and another where they just give you the results without any integration.
Additional bonus, Firefox Android has extensions, so you can get uBlock Origin and such :)
I have a similar problem with Google Maps. I don't want it tracking my location history to my Google Account (integration I never asked for), but when I disable this it even refuses to remember my search history for addresses and such (no reason that needs cloud storage except Google wanting to get their hands on this info). Therefore I most often use Open Streetmaps with Maps.me. Which has other advantages too, so it's not all bad.
I think the right way to do what you're asking is to serve Google specific content to users that are logged in to their Google account. This should be easy to justify legally as well.
I think it really depends on the product (e.g. having Google Maps integrated is not a bad idea, because that's what you usually want to access if you enter a address in Google).
But honestly, I don't know anyone that is happy with the Google Products service in Germany. They don't even show links to Amazon here, although they often have the best total price (because of free shipping). I even know a lot of people that go directly to Amazon or a price comparison site because the results presented by Google are so crappy.
As results might be different based on country, region and cookie, here is a screenshot comparing idealo (a large price comparison site) with Google Product search (I just picked this specific product randomly): http://imgur.com/a/MByay
It was also more convenient to have Internet Explorer ship with Windows.
But it happened to be part of MS strategy to sideline other browsers, and gain enough power to become the de-facto standard. We got lucky and avoided that, but doing only what's most convenient at any given point in time can be harmful over the longer term. After all, Microsoft at that time tried to established their (patent-covered, binary-blob) .doc as the format for the web, instead of the open HTML.
This is a really interesting topic; you might not care about a random small business, but you probably care about the future of Wikipedia. There were complains as Google snippets were basically cutting Wikimedia funds by showing the info but not the "fund us" banner when needed. If Search integrated it further without providing any other funding, they'd basically kill Wikipedia in the middle-long term, which would be a really awful thing.
I can see the same happening with many other products and companies and EU point of view here. I can also see Google's points for making a smoother user experience and getting more money by keeping the users longer in Google web stack. It's not a black and white issue at all, instead a balance must be achieved; USA is more pro-enterprise while EU is more pro-citizen/small company.
You might remember the first notorious case that happened: Internet Explorer. At the top of IE usage, EU started mandating Microsoft to give a choice for its users to use the browser that they prefer. This implied in practical terms that all new systems would ask the user on loading the computer the first time what browser they preferred, with the choices including Opera and Firefox.
This is a ridiculous figure, how can they come up with a figure more than 2x times the amount of the previous record (for Intel's egregious behavior) for deciding what content goes on their own platform, which wasn't previously known to be illegal?
What do they want to force Google to do now, prohibit being able to advertise on their own platform? give their competitors priority placement for free? How many rival comparison services do they need to show now? There could be hundreds popping up to take advantage of the forced exposure with scam and ad-ridden pages. Does Google have to show them all? Who decides? Will this ruling extend to all other relevant content Google shows around Search results?
Guess we'll have to see, but this ruling could force Google to provide a degraded Customer experience which I guess is one way to make their Services less appealing and allow competition to catch up.
> This is a ridiculous figure, how can they come up with a figure more than 2x times the amount of the previous record (for Intel's egregious behavior) for deciding what content goes on their own platform, which wasn't previously known to be illegal
By following the rules & regulations set out, which Google will have been fully aware of. This is explained in the link and should not have required calling it "ridiculous". I also disagree it wasn't previously known to be illegal unless you can show something has been applied retroactively (so a law created in 2008 or later).
> The Commission's fine of €2 424 495 000 takes account of the duration and gravity of the infringement. In accordance with the Commission's 2006 Guidelines on fines (see press release and MEMO), the fine has been calculated on the basis of the value of Google's revenue from its comparison shopping service in the 13 EEA countries concerned.
> The Commission Decision requires Google to stop its illegal conduct within 90 days of the Decision and refrain from any measure that has the same or an equivalent object or effect. In particular, the Decision orders Google to comply with the simple principle of giving equal treatment to rival comparison shopping services and its own service:
> Google has to apply the same processes and methods to position and display rival comparison shopping services in Google's search results pages as it gives to its own comparison shopping service.
Doesn't mean they have to show terrible shopping pages, they just have to compete with them on an even footing rather than pushing every other comparison site back to almost nowhere in the results.
> By following the rules & regulations set out, which Google will have been fully aware of.
There was no previous ruling that indicated that displaying their own relevant content on their own Search pages was illegal. It's absurd to think displaying relevant content in the context of what the User is searching for is illegal, or that they should've been investing resources in helping their competitors get more exposure.
These shackles on User Experience are going to give Amazon and Bing an advantage who aren't limited in their ability to provide integrated services or forced competitor placement.
> Doesn't mean they have to show terrible shopping pages, they just have to compete with them on an even footing rather than pushing every other comparison site back to almost nowhere in the results.
Are they going to be able to charge for prominent placement or do competitors get it for free? If there was an Auction Google could just outbid everyone since they're going to keep the bulk of the revenue, which they're unlikely going to be allowed to do, so if they're not forced to give prominent placement for free, they're going to have to charge an amount they wont be able to bid for themselves.
Are you suggesting the ruling is out of line with the regulations?
Previous anti-trust rulings seem pretty similar to me. If microsoft gets into trouble for making IE a default browser or bundling windows media player, I'm really not surprised with the way this went.
> It's absurd to think displaying relevant content in the context of what the User is searching for is illegal
It's not absurd to think that using your dominance in a market to heavily push people towards your own other services is illegal.
The Commission also note that it's not just the relevance of the link, but the position that makes a big difference.
> b) Furthermore, the effects cannot just be explained by the fact that the first result is more relevant because evidence also shows that moving the first result to the third rank leads to a reduction in the number of clicks by about 50%.
Since the introduction, it massively increased click-throughs to their already available service, with a corresponding huge decrease to competitors.
Was their own service good?
> Contemporary evidence from Google shows that the company was aware that Froogle's market performance was relatively poor (one internal document from 2006 stated "Froogle simply doesn't work").
So to be clear the problem is that they had a pretty naff service, which when treated similarly to other players lost out. They then promoted it far above other results, resulting in a huge shift towards them and away from their competitors. They did not compete by making the service better, but by using their huge dominance in one market to step into another and significantly harm the other players.
> Previous anti-trust rulings seem pretty similar to me. If microsoft gets into trouble for making IE a default browser or bundling windows media player, I'm really not surprised with the way this went.
What other Website do you know has been penalized for showing their own content and are being forced to give their competitors prominence? Microsoft had a 95%+ Monopoly on Desktop Operating Systems and wouldn't allow you to remove IE, anyone can easily go to amazon.com, bing.com, ebay.com or visit any other website to do their shopping if they prefer to.
Should Amazon be forced to show results for e-readers other than Kindle or audiobooks other than those on Audible? I don't think it's obvious at all where the line is.
Do amazon treat the kindle differently from other ebook readers on their site? If, for example, kobo fits my search better and they demote it while putting kindle content right at the top. Does that kind of thing happen?
In which case, quite possibly, if
* amazon can be argued to have a very large position, with the vast majority of searches going through it
* it can be shown that people tend to click almost exclusively on the first or first few links
* they are treating their own, different, service more favourably than competitors (and remember when in the context of google, it's how people would find the competitors in the first place)
* you can see them having hugely increased sales for their own product after the introduction, and massively decreased sales for other people
But then my understanding of the regulations comes largely from the links here.
Fundamentally though, if you're big enough to be concerned about this you should be able to afford the legal teams to figure this out or approach the commission to discuss what is and is not within the regulations.
To answer your first question, since I don't think it was rhetorical, I'm aware of at least 1 case where amazon stopped selling competing products (1).
I also just searched for "aaa batteries" and the first hit, after the AmazonBasics ad, were AmazonBasics batteries.
I'm not saying either of these are anti-competitive. I understand that more goes into it than just that. Just offering these little facts in case anyone else is curious.
(I do think that with both Amazon's increasing dominance and seemingly increasing aggressiveness, they're heading for legal issues).
Sounds about right. But first they'd have to establish that Amazon has market dominance in the entire EU. Which I don't think they have. So there's that.
Then they would investigate if they abuse this dominance to stifle competition. Which I think your batteries example would qualify for. They'd probably look a bit further though because I dunno, if it's just batteries :-p So they'd gather more evidence and if they find enough, they too will get an antitrust case.
Just that, market dominance in itself is not illegal, so if Amazon, unlike Google (knowingly!!) did, uses that dominance responsibly, no problem.
What I got from the article, the investigation has been very reasonable and it's beyond doubt that Google went way over the line.
People may question whether this EU regulation is right (but I believe it is), but from the looks of it, at least it's fair: With great market dominance comes great responsibility.
>Previous anti-trust rulings seem pretty similar to me. If microsoft gets into trouble for making IE a default browser or bundling windows media player, I'm really not surprised with the way this went.
Except this has created quite the slippery slope. What's stopping the EU from deciding it's unfair for a search engine to have it's own maps served prominently when searching an address? What's stopping the EU from deciding it's unfair for Google to provide reverse image search through it's webtool (you used to have to go to tineye if you wanted that)?
You can pretty much apply this ruling to every Google product that is not their basic, text, search engine. It seems like Google is on the edge of simply being classified a utility in the EU.
As stated in the press release, the fine has been calculated on the basis of the value of Google's revenue from its comparison shopping service in the 13 EEA countries concerned, taking into account the "duration and gravity" of the infringement. What the commission is asking is simply equal treatment between rival comparison shopping services and its own.
When I visit rivalshoppingservice.com then I would expect to see that rival shopping service. When I visit google, I would expect to see google.
Are the rivals going to be required to show google results now or is this really not about choice but about crippling google or is it about extracting an easy multi-billion dollar payday?
When I go to the SNCF (French rail) website, are they showing me flight and bus options or only their train results?
Nobody is forcing anyone to visit google. It’s a website. Perhaps if the EU really cared, they’d ask themselves why Europe hasn’t produced a credible Google rival.
That settlement money ought to go directly to funding EU startups. Instead it will likely make its way into CAP agricultural subsidies. The Common Agricultural Policy is about 35% of the entire EU budget despite supporting an industry that that is just 1.6% of EU GDP. It’s clear that the EU prioritizes some industries over others and then they wring their hands when American tech becomes ubiquitous.
They're returning relevant information Customers are searching for. If it wasn't relevant or useful people would use a different Service they'd deem more valuable to them. A major part of Google's simplicity is they provide a single search box you can use to search for anything, I don't want to have to go to 100 different sites to search for 100 different things.
> Google has demoted rival comparison shopping services in its search results: rival comparison shopping services appear in Google's search results on the basis of Google's generic search algorithms. Google has included a number of criteria in these algorithms, as a result of which rival comparison shopping services are demoted. Evidence shows that even the most highly ranked rival service appears on average only on page four of Google's search results, and others appear even further down. Google's own comparison shopping service is not subject to Google's generic search algorithms, including such demotions.
There is nothing wrong with Google's integration. The complaint is that Google unfairly promotes its own services at the expense of rivals. When I search for something, I expect the search results displayed to be relevant and fair. I have no problem with Google having that sponsored Google Shopping ad, but demoting other highly relevant results to the fourth page is highly anti-competitive and downright unfair. How many times in the last week have you actually flipped through 4 pages of Google Search results?
"They're returning relevant information Customers are searching for."
They were really not.
For every search you assume you will be given the more popular matches, what they were doing was purposefully bypassing their own algorithm to their advantage, giving doctored results.
There wouldn't have been any problem if they promoted their service making it clear it was not part of the search results.
EDIT: For a counterexample, google "flights price compare".
You will be shown a small form at the top from which you can use their own service.
It is clearly separated from the search results, which show the actual most popular websites for flight comparison.
"Google has systematically given prominent placement to its own comparison shopping service: when a consumer enters a query into the Google search engine in relation to which Google's comparison shopping service wants to show results, these are displayed at or near the top of the search results.
Google has demoted rival comparison shopping services in its search results: rival comparison shopping services appear in Google's search results on the basis of Google's generic search algorithms. Google has included a number of criteria in these algorithms, as a result of which rival comparison shopping services are demoted. Evidence shows that even the most highly ranked rival service appears on average only on page four of Google's search results, and others appear even further down. Google's own comparison shopping service is not subject to Google's generic search algorithms, including such demotions."
" Evidence shows that even the most highly ranked rival service appears on average only on page four of Google's search results, and others appear even further down. Google's own comparison shopping service is not subject to Google's generic search algorithms, including such demotions."
I didn't. "Doctoring results" sounds to me like modifying the ranking of organic results to demote those services, which is not what that sentence says either.
So, their market dominance was established from their web search product. The antitrust ruling was based on them abusing the power that comes with this dominance to stifle competition with their shopping product.
While it may be the case that today, Google likes to pile all these things into one integrated product (the user benefit of this being really debatable, even if you personally like it), their market dominance was initially acquired from their web search.
If they had historically always been demoting other shopping sites in favour of their own, they would probably not have gotten this dominant at all. One of the features that set Google apart from the other big search engines in its early days was in fact very similar: Other engines would sell rankings and other tricks often favouring profit over relevance. Google didn't do this, partially out of "principle" (which is apparently lost now), partially because their pagerank algorithm was so superior in ranking for relevance that they didn't need to. If they had only returned results for their own shopping business, it wouldn't have gained nearly as much support and wouldn't have been as successful.
But because of this established market dominance, they can get away with it today, because everything is integrated, people just google stuff, even if shopping results are heavily skewed towards their own. And not only does this obscure competition, the competition that does appear far down really sucks, and now you have people arguing that Google Shopping is actually in fact better. Google's web search has deteriorated in quality quite a bit, especially for queries related to "integrated Google products", which makes sense because why bother sorting out a web filled with spam for the good bits (like they used to work very hard at) if you can just push your own product instead?
Finally, regardless of whether Google likes to integrate and pile everything into one heap, Online Shopping and Web Search are different markets.
That's the whole point of this antitrust, just because different businesses in different markets can be grouped under one huge company, doesn't mean it can abuse its market dominance in one market to stifle competition in another.
And this claim is not about the other dominant positions because if they are the better product, they will be shown. This is about Google trying to prop up an inferior product in a non-dominant position using their dominant search position. In this case, the inferior non-dominant position product is Google Shopping. There better dominant positioned product out there that Google does not own which it is not showing fairly.
Google has a dominant position in search. Google also has lots of other businesses offering different products and services. Maybe those other businesses really are the very best in their respective markets, maybe they aren't. In a proper market, we would find out which is best from seeing them compete against other companies' products/services, and the need to out-compete other companies would drive quality up and prices down.
What actually happened was that Google removed the need to compete with anyone, by always listing its own other businesses up-front in search results. Since Google has the dominant position in the search market, this guarantees a steady stream of customers to the other businesses, even if they're not as good as other companies' products/services, and means they don't face competitive pressure. Without competitive pressure, quality doesn't get driven up and prices don't get driven down.
Since we want competitive markets to drive quality up and prices down, we have laws which don't allow a company that dominates one type of product/service to use that as a way to achieve dominance in other products/services by avoiding the need to compete.
> When I go to the SNCF (French rail) website, are they showing me flight and bus options or only their train results?
Yes, apparently they do show bus results. Both from their own bus company and at least one seemingly unrelated one. I know it is similar in Sweden with SJ, which shows trains and buses from other companies.
> Nobody is forcing anyone to visit google. It’s a website. Perhaps if the EU really cared, they’d ask themselves why Europe hasn’t produced a credible Google rival.
Isn't that essentially what they are doing? It might be to late to compete on web search. That doesn't mean Google should have an unfair advantage in other search like price comparison.
> That settlement money ought to go directly to funding EU startups.
Most EU startups will be happy if they just have a chance to compete "pound for pound". US companies have been enjoying single digit VAT and corporate income tax for years. Which is both the result of EU laws and the US leaving their own "loopholes" open to make their companies more competitive.
698 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 320 ms ] thread(cue "the market will regulate itself")
If you're big but not a monopolist, and you do the exact same thing, then way less of a problem. Hence Apple could bundle Safari with iOS but Microsoft couldn't bundle IE with Windows XP in the exact same way.
You're also interpreting the word "big" perhaps too literally. In your example, Apple is not big in the sense I mean. Microsoft might be, but that doesn't mean I agree with the judgement against them.
If people like your product so much that 95% of the market uses it, I don't see the abuse.
... but human attention is.
Which is why the fine is not for 95% of the market using the product, but for abusing that position to unfairly disadvantage competitors.
> it's about using a monopoly position in one field to gain entry to another.
It's not about Google dominating the search market. It's about Google leveraging their dominant position on the search market to promote their comparison shopping service, which is a different product for different market.
Think of the competition laws as nerfing your ability to leverage domination of one market into immediate domination of other markets. Companies don't have natural rights, there are only the arbitrary rules of the market game, that are intended to promote general prosperity in the society.
If you would not have that kind of control (and fines when they break those rules) it would be virtually impossible to beat these kind of entities or they can use their weight to strong-arm them-self in a lot of markets. See what happened in the past with Microsoft.
Freedoms exist only to let companies thrive insofar as that then lets them sell goods that benefit the people. Once that stops, the freedoms stop.
I'm being slightly dry cut, but this is a good rule of thumb when looking at society. It's easy to forget about the bigger picture and think that companies have any type of inherent right to exist. They don't. They're here for us. Of course, theory vs practice, yada yada. but again: rule of thumb for regulations.
If anything, punishing a big company for its potentially big effect on markets values 1) markets above people and 2) competitors' ability to participate on the market above the people.
Banning integration or self-promotion could very well result in a worse product overall that serves people worse.
For example this is my view and the view of most EU citizens:
"punishing a big company for its potentially big effect on markets values 1) people above markets and 2) competitors' ability to participate on the market which is to the benefit of costumers (people)"
That seems completely backwards. Governments have only one purpose—to serve the people.
Companies have only one purpose—to serve its shareholders. Of course, purely pursuing this purpose can lead to perverse outcomes so we have regulation to keep it in check.
> Companies [don't] have any type of inherent right to exist
Huh? In so far as individuals have a right to engage in trade and commerce, and in so far as they have a right to engage in this in coordination with other individuals, companies do have a right to exist.
I hate to split hairs, but no, they don't. Companies are just an arbitrary legal entity.
You can self-promote whatever you want, as long as it's independent of others' promotions.
For FY16, they had a revenue of approx. $90.27b, that leaves a fine of approx. $12.3m.
*edit: forgot to divide by 365 (days). I apologise.
That would actually be a lot of money even for Google.
Antitrust: Commission fines Google €2.42 billion for abusing dominance as search engine by giving illegal advantage to own comparison shopping service
Antitrust rules. The EU decided they broke them. Whether you think they did or didn't is irrelevant.
This is more about politics and EU bragging itself, for doing something "fair", for the people.
This is more about politics and EU bragging itself, for doing something "fair", for the people.
In that case, if you win, others can still win as well.
You win by being the natural favorite of users' free choice of exchange, not by eradicating the ability of others to compete. We need more penalties like this for those usurping the concept of the market.
This is literally what the board game "Monopoly" is about. Like that, only you can't quit the game and are dependent on it for survival.
Except the carrot is only dangling on the stick and as a donkey, you're not allowed to ever get it - because the moment you do, you stop moving forward. Hence it's imperative to a) convince people they can win, and b) ensure they don't. Because it's not the players that are socially useful, but the game itself.
A 'winner' would mean the end of it.
[0] http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_MEMO-09-235_en.htm?loca...
Consumers "pay" for Google's services by giving ads attention so the ads have value and Google can sell them.
All the data harvesting is a means to a end: to make the ads more appealing so you'll click. Google don't profit from the data directly; in fact all the data harvesting and processing is a significant cost factor. There are certainly other businesses that resell data and profit directly from data harvesting, but AFAIK, Google is not really one of them.
It's a bit like saying that you pay a café by letting them observe you while you sit in their chairs. A basic misunderstanding of what's actually going on.
The real value of advertising is in showing the right advertisement at the right time at the right person.
Personal data is to advertisement what sugar is to candy.
Your analogy with the café is very misguided and not related at all with the situation.
Consider that Google actually became super profitable well before all the detailed tracking started. You grossly underestimate the synergy of "people searching for products" and "displaying ads". Everything else is an optimization.
You're describing Facebook... which is no where near as profitable as Google, in spite of much more invasive tracking.
If you never click an ad and use an adblocker so you never even see them, your traffic and your data just cost Google money. They may be able to extract some small amount of value by observing your behaviour and using those insights to improve their products, but they don't make any money until someone pays for an ad.
I agree the café analogy isn't perfect. I was just pointing out that outsiders who don't understand what's going on may fundamentally misunderstand the transaction. You can still provide value to the café by sitting in their chairs if you liven up the place and give them feedback on how to make the place nicer.
But if customers never buy anything, the café goes broke. And people stop interacting with ads on Google, Google does too.
Even if you don't use the ads or if simply ignore them, you still represent a group of interests that can be used to feed and train the machine.
Google learns through the searches you make and through the videos you watch and your behaviour will be used to improve the accuracy of ads shown to other people. That's your payment for using Google's services.
The only reason people stop interacting with ads it's because ads don't bring any real value, And any data that Google might collect brings up that value a lot.
I think you underestimate a lot of the number of people unaware of Google's presence and influence when it comes to advertisement. This number is much bigger than the number of people who install adblock on their browser.
I don't think it's a stretch to assert that users that engage with and click on ads are much more valuable to Google than users that don't.
Whether the users that do neither contribute positively or negatively to the bottom line is an interesting question. I suspect they're a net negative, but obviously you disagree.
Google themselves probably know the answer, but I doubt they're telling...
Aside: a supporting data-point for my gut feeling here is that AdSense has always contributed much, much less to Google's revenue than AdWords does. The difference between the two gives a clear indication of how capturing user intent (searching for products) completely dominates how valuable (=effective) the ads are, and is much more important than all the other tracking combined. Google could probably turn off all the tracking and still make tons of money. Some numbers are here: http://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/020515/busine...
Advertisers quite literally pay for clicks. That was part of how Google disrupted the market back in the day; most other advertising networks were selling "impressions", but Google was so confident in the relevance of their ads that you got impressions for free and only paid when a customer actually clicked on it.
The click is worth paying for, because it is a signal that the user has seen the ad, thought about the ad, and is interested in the ad. Advertising gold.
Obviously Google have many products (they bought Doubleclick an "impressions" company), and there are analytics value-ads and all sorts of things. But the core of their business is still pay-per-click advertising.
Your idea that advertisers are buying raw data is a misunderstanding.
Google sells targeted advertising, not clicks. Nobody pays for clicks. I do not think advertisers are buying raw data. I think they are buying advertising which is targeted based on that raw data.
In pay-for-click, advertisers are paying for advertising which is effective. The click is how that is measured.
There are other ways to measure effectiveness, but measuring clicks is simple and reliable. No matter how you do it, advertisers ultimately want to pay for ads that work and lead to sales.
Everything else is a means to an end, targeting in particular. Ineffective advertising is a worthless waste of money, no matter how well targeted it is. Untargeted advertising which leads to sales on the other hand, is very valuable.
So sure, advertisers will prefer targeted advertising. But that's because they expect it will work better than the alternative. What matters to them is whether it works, not how.
To the general public the how is critical though. If there was less tracking and spying and data harvesting we'd all be better off. So it's very important to squash the misunderstanding that tracking and targeting itself has intrinsic value for anyone. For society (and for the ad networks), tracking has a significant cost and is in many ways a significant liability. For advertisers it's a tool in their toolbox, and if we could replace it with a more benign one, that'd be good for everyone.
> The German Minister for Interior, Thomas de Maizière, has voiced many of the concerns of Member States over the concept of “private ownership of data” and the risk this might entail for consumer privacy. Minister de Maiziere cautions, “If I can sell ‘my’ data, there is a danger of privacy being up for sale. Then at some point, only the wealthy will be able to afford to opt out, while the economically weaker are effectively forced to put ‘their’ data up for sale”. The DCD proposal also conflicts with the rights and remedies detailed in the UK’s Consumer Rights Act, which become invalidated when consumers exchange personal data in return for access to digital content. While the UK government has stated that it has “no fundamental objection” to applying these rights to situations where consumers exchange personal data for access to ‘free’ digital content, it has also said these rights could “unduly inhibit” that “very innovative business model”. Most recently, Giovanni Buttarelli (EDPS) published an Opinion on the Commission’s proposal, warning that “individuals should not be required to disclose personal data in ‘payment’ for an online service”.
https://cdt.org/blog/ec-proposal-to-pay-with-personal-data-c...
One man's populism is another man's social and economic progress.
I like it and hope that Google will stop promoting their services without listing alternatives for lots of things that they promote on the search page (Google Maps, Android, Chrome, Youtube, ...). See 'other cases' in the document that could be next potential steps (ads, Android)
I want google maps, youtube, shopping links, and largely view the search as a portal to the google platform. Removing this is removing a feature customers and the company wants, because other companies want to compete on individual products that may or may not be better while google is providing a platform with products you want integrated to simplify your life.
I'll take simplicity, trust and reliability over a dozen disconnected services from different companies that I don't know what their motives are. I know googles motives, and as a user of their platform otherwise this service is exactly what I want.
Ultimately my argument is if another company came along and did the exact same thing from the start (integrated platform with search etc...) no one would have an issue. the "Issue" is apparently google's existing search dominance. This is why i think it should be opt-in for users, and by default off. I don't think google is wrong for offering the service to users who want it, competitors have to provide a benefit or product that is so clearly better it offsets the benefits of a more integrated platform. That's the market/competition, not the EU's role.
The preferred solution of the EU would be that there would be a standardized API between search engines and map providers, shopping providers, etc, and you could simply choose which map provider you'd want, and that'd be shown in every search engine.
This is still being discussed, of course, as no solution has been found yet, but in general the idea is based on Android's Intent system, where this concept works quite well.
How would Google differentiate between a search and an address without having the Maps product deeply integrated ? Sure they could identify the address and then render the map using say Apple Maps. But what if Apple Maps didn't understand the address or if their API implementation didn't match up.
Seems like it would very much hurt the overall experience.
Microsoft had a dominant position in operating systems. Then they developed a web browser, and rather than compete against other web browsers, simply bundled it into the operating system. This meant they got an instant dominant position in web browsers. But they didn't get it by being better than other web browsers, they got it by being just good enough that people wouldn't bother going to the effort of evaluating other options, since their browser came with the operating system. This effectively ended the competitive market for web browsers.
Google has a dominant position in search. Then they developed a lot of other products and services, and rather than compete against other companies offering those products/services, they simply pushed their own versions to the top of search-result pages. This meant they could get an instant dominant position in the other markets. But not by being better than competitors; they could get it by being just good enough that people wouldn't bother going to the effort of tracking down other options, since Google's version was right there in front of them already. This could effectively end the competitive market for many types of products and services.
Any time a company uses a dominant position in one market to subvert or outright end competition in another market, that's bad. And in many places, including the US and the EU, is also illegal.
A similar thing is going on with the food. We have a more strict regulation, and there was some talks about deregulating it to do more business with USA; however this would in practical terms mean lowering the quality of our food. Of course everyone complained! The same is going on with the internet.
This strive for a less divided population is probably a reason why right-wing populist (or "undemocratic authoritarian") parties don't appeal to a majority in EU countries.
Well that's just factually incorrect isn't it?
Opinions on the decision will sure differ among readers, but I think the decision is in place with the majority of EU citizens' consensus.
Umm, it says so in the article, the googling was unnecessary.
That said, as far as I know (I'll keep an eye on it), I haven't always received an instant check in Chrome when dealing with a captcha.
No, it also works on other browsers. I know because I exclusively use Safari and I encounter this one-click-captcha thing regularly.
The thing is it only works on browsers you use regularly. It looks like they are analysing/tracking the behaviour of your browser (using google ads and other assets embedded in web pages) and determine if your browsing behaviour matches that of a human.
Google owns the server, Google owns the client, Google owns DNS, Google owns domains, Google even owns > 50% of mobile. It's way too much ownership under one roof.
Pretty sweet deal, yeah? 99% of the population gets an easy checkbox, and all the people who care just need to fill out some questions to prove they're not a bot. It's not like you're blocked from using the form.
In what alternate reality ?
Whether or not that number is correct, it's definitely a significant portion of the population doing it.
The worst part is when you need to prove to Google who you are when already logged in to a (non-Google) online store that you have purchased from previously. That is just rediculous and seems to be getting more common. At least those are not impossible, but still. I do not know if Google has anything to do with promoting that use but if they do they should be held responsible for that (as well as the businesses that use such things).
You can't have your cake and eat it too, either you are for privacy and should expect the hassles this create or you want the convenience and have to pay with your privacy for it.
I don't really understand why are you pressing so much on this issue, you have choices with tradeoffs, as most things in life.
You're acting like these are immutable laws of the universe rather than properties of google's design decisions.
I think your point wouldn't encounter as much resistance (or at least different resistance) if you just said something to the effect of "devoply, you're in the X% of users that google tolerates providing a sub-standard experience to, and I don't give a fuck either."
When I tried again with chromium it got instantly verified.
As for the decision, it may seem unfair for Google, but the European commission has to look at the bigger picture: its search dominance is so big that it gives Google an unfair advantage when competing in other business sectors, driving others out of competition even if they have a much better product. That's not good for society in the long run
It now integrates tons of specialized results such as embedded videos and smart answers to direct questions. It will only move further and further away from simple lists of sites as their AI improves.
I fear this fine will deter innovation here as any special results Google adds will be scrutinized heavily. It's also very possible the complex data they need for it's 'smart' results aren't available by integrating with other 3rd party services (at least not initially), which is likely why Google even created these competing services in the first place.
If Google was merely a Yellow Pages style service as it was previously then I'd be more sympathetic to the idea of distorted rankings favouring Google services but that's becoming less and less the typical user experience.
Well, I'm primarily agains the idea of giving a single, non democratically controlled non-international entity, so much power.
To the point where I don't care if Google is forced to stop innovating in being a "one stop shop" for the internet if that means more distributed sources and more distributed (even if lower quality and with fewer resources) innovation.
Sometimes, when it comes to society, it's best to have less technology more uniformly distributed than a single source of highly advanced technology.
Google could partner with other companies to do integration in their search engine for those smart results but then they'd just be giving another company an unfair advantage.
I don't see how you could stop this without crippling the type of answers Google provides. Besides maybe offering open tools they could automously integrate with.
Google pushed for adding metadata so any web developer can add things like star ratings and pricing directly to SERPs. But the adoption has been limited and limited compared to a full custom integration with a web service they control.
But regardless Google is a monopoly that we can't really do much about. Plenty of people have tried to compete and failed so there will be some consequences of that.
Considering how important the tool is to the world I'm quite the opposite. I'd rather let Google have a few specialized subsites which they can dominate a few markets with ease, in exchange for not severely limiting the potential of their technology - a technology we are all stuck using for the foreseeable future.
Maybe or maybe not, but fining seems like a step in the right direction.
>I don't see how you could stop this without crippling the type of answers Google provides.
As I wrote above, I'm all for crippling them if that's what it takes. But turning them into some kind of public infrastructure is another way.
The fine is focused on Google Shopping. I'd say the biggest competitors are Amazon and eBay.
While I'm unsure if the EU can effectively do something about Google as a search engine monopoly, I'm pretty sure Google can be beaten in the e-commerce sector.
Step by step, down the giants. Claiming the resolution of the matter in a single step is unrealistic.
My concern is that even one step like the fine here will significantly chill their innovation with their search service in every category. As they will see adding any special advanced listings in search results as a big risk of being fined.
We're stuck with this giant so I'm not sure why you want to down it when there won't be comparable alternatives popping up in it's place.
This isn't just Google shopping being pushed further down the results ranking but how the shopping subsite is deeply integrated into the search results.
Which is why I said the proposed solution is regressing search engines back to simple directories which harms customers for some neglible gain for other small companies.
Exploiting your existing user base, in order to get traction for your next service, that in your opinion gives an added value, is not what I’d call innovation. If your new product or service is really innovative, then you don’t need this kind of tricks to get traction, users will come to you (because of the added value your new service gives to them).
The early Google was innovative, and won over the other search engines because of that.
If you are not able to get traction without this, then what you call innovation is not innovative, and you’re overestimating your product. For me (and apparently for the eu commission too), the rest is simple propaganda. Some find comfortable to believe it, probably because it’s profitable for them.
I don’t know what is the climate inside Google, but if this is able to significantly chill their “innovation”, then I think that they’re simply waiting for the next big thing in tech.
And it really sucks at web search today, compared to before (~10-15 years ago).
This is personal opinion of course but your argument depends on all this innovation always being an improvement to society. But Google innovates to improve its profits, which sometimes aligns with public interest, and sometimes not.
If it doesn't necessarily improve things for society, why would a company have a right to innovate despite everything else? Especially if you have to weigh it against the abuse of market dominance power to stifle competition (also deterring innovation, btw).
Because of that dominance, it deserves, no, requires scrutiny much, much more than not being deterred innovation. The latter is a "nice thing", the former is a necessity. Sorry but if you're that big, that dominant, of course we're going to scrutinize your responsibilities. If that's going to mean less fancy features, sad but so be it, the alternative is letting Google abuse all that power unchecked!
edit: I think coldtea said it better (in this same subthread) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14645033
I'm more interested in seeing how much of her work will actually hold up in court. Better to focus on 10 good cases, than spread yourself thin on 30 and lose 80% of them. I guess she'll be long gone by then. The joys of politics.
This will kill two birds with one stone--firstly it will correct the economic damage Google has caused by abusing their monopoly position. Secondly it will make it harder for them to maintain and abuse their monopoly in the future.
The software industry today is filled with companies who seek to establish a monopoly so that they can extract monopoly rents. This behavior almost always skirts the boundaries of legality, and it's getting worse. Companies are being created with the explicit business model of throwing huge sums of money at illegal activity in order to establish market dominance--see Uber.
Monopolies are not good for markets and this belief is already reflected in our antitrust laws. We need to give those laws some teeth and come up with creative solutions that don't just punish bad behavior, but also encourage competition.
Even better: Make Google pay them directly. I don't know if that is possible on European level, but here in Germany, fines are often paid directly from the criminal to the non-profit, which is usually chosen in a round-robin-like fashion from the local non-profits in the criminal's (or court's) region.
Since the EU is likely more than just 10%/20% of their income, they still make some money here, but I doubt that it was worth it for Froogle…
"In accordance with the Commission's 2006 Guidelines on fines (see press release and MEMO), the fine has been calculated on the basis of the value of Google's revenue from its comparison shopping service in the 13 EEA countries concerned."
how much revenue do they make from EU clients?
If Google stopped servicing Europe, one or more European competitors would emerge in days or weeks and Google's dominance would be threatened worldwide within months. It would be a completely suicidal move.
https://www.qwant.com/
Moreover Qwant is just bing search results repackaged.
Not in France and Germany
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qwant#Criticism
The thing is, if they want to do business in the EU they have to abide by the rules of the EU. It's not that complex!
What precedent is there for imposing rules this this on other businesses? "You have to design new technology and build custom services that show business information for your competitors on your advertising/websites/properties"?
Yes it was [0].
> If I owned a website that had a search engine and comparison shopping and email, I would not expect that it's somehow wrong if my search engine shows results from my service's comparison shopping and email
If your search engine had a dominant position in the EU market and if you used that dominance to put your shopping product above other competitors', then yes, it would not only be wrong, but also illegal.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union_competition_law
It was. There are specific requirements in Article 102 about abusing dominant market positions to "apply…dissimilar conditions to equivalent transactions with other trading parties, thereby placing them at a competitive disadvantage".
If I owned a website that had a search engine and comparison shopping and email, I would not expect that it's somehow wrong if my search engine shows results from my service's comparison shopping and email.
If you owned a massive market-dominating service, then your team of corporate lawyers should expect that.
"You have to design new technology and build custom services that show business information for your competitors on your advertising/websites/properties"?
That's not what happened though – the specific instruction is:
the Decision orders Google to comply with the simple principle of giving equal treatment to rival comparison shopping services and its own service
That's all, and it is not unreasonable to impose these terms of a market dominating force that has used that dominance to crowd out competition.
What precedent is there for imposing rules this this on other businesses?
SO MUCH. http://ec.europa.eu/competition/elojade/isef/index.cfm
The EU economy is bigger than that of the US and Google's position in EU is more dominant. Bing doesn't work well for Europeans, there are no real competitors. Maybe the US market has more marketing spending, compared to Europe.
My guess would be that Google makes about the same in the EU as it does in the US.
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2016/nov/04/google-pays...
Nearly as much as in the US, with the potential to be even higher.
I assume that Google is attempting to make devs start using a proprietary technology instead of the well-established HTML standard, or:
- somehow lock everyone in with the format
- force people to switch to Chrome since it would run those pages better
- force other browsers to implement the technology (until they sneak in a patented technology once AMP is popular?)
Where can I read a good article about why AMP is bad?
https://mobile.nytimes.com/2015/10/07/us/politics/hillary-cl...
You get this:
https://amp.gstatic.com/v/mobile.nytimes.com/2015/10/07/us/p...
Now ironically, this is actually safer for a number of websites because it has the side effect of making normal HTTP content HTTPS, but the idea of Google taking over control over the content, the advertising, what methods are used for analytics tracking, and what possible pieces of content can be embedded destroys the whole "the web should be free" concept.
It's not something dramatically new, Facebook started doing it years ago and even Google news was a (more limited) form of it, but just because some things are possible doesn't mean they should be done. For example I can make a website, example.com, where every link gets turned into
example.com/v/yourwebsite.com
And then proxy all the content through my server replacing links like yourwebsite.com/login to example.com/v/yourwebsite.com/login and the majority of users will not notice that the website hasn't changed. And really the only thing that stops people from doing this is copyright law and a shared societal understanding that corporations should be able to control their content, not technical countermeasures.
I would never do that.
I personally run my own mail server and use Mail to move all messages to Google Inbox, so that I can use Google's excellent spam filter and email grouping while still keeping control over my email.
I use both Google Photos and iCloud Photos.
If I had to have Google proxy my website, I would at least give my visitors a CNAME instead of Google's URL, to avoid getting locked in into the technology.
I know a lot of people that would be totally screwed if Google closed their account for some reason: no more email, contacts, photos, etc. etc.
If an AMP equivalent standard came out by Mozilla or Microsoft or Facebook, it would be an uphill task for them to get google to give those pages special treatment in search results.
Hence, there is an argument to be made about AMP being an anti-competitive (search engine dominance used to push it's own diet-html).
For example, Google is already favoring HTML above, say, TXT pages. Demanding TXT to be shown as high as HTML in search results doesn't make much sense.
From the official site: "The Google AMP Cache is a proxy-based content delivery network for delivering all valid AMP documents." In other words, you are welcome to tie yourself to Google infrastructure, not merely to a proprietary software platform that you can at least use on your own (like Windows etc. in the Microsoft antitrust cases).
But doesn't it hold for any market, that as technology advances, the barriers to entry become larger?
Put another way, if the EU tried to take money from some random e.g. American or Japanese company without a physical presence in the EU, what channels could the EU use to twist their arm across national boundaries?
Somewhat related, there could be good money in providing an explicitly non-hostile legal environment for companies, where they won't get in trouble for e.g. promoting their own services or offering services for free [1].
[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2012/feb/03/google-fi...
The EU could simply seize Google's servers and intellectual property, and sell it to fund this.
Additionally, if you'd create a jurisdiction just to avoid the law, you can expect that no country will protect your copyright. You'd have the EU courts support every person stealing your IP.
You really don't want to pick a fight with a legal system that your entire business depends on.
> abandoning all EU revenue
How ? A corp does not have to exist in EU to recieve payments from EU.
> They'd have to submit to the US tax system instead.
For such tax structring to work, Google just need one non-US IP holding jurisdiction.
So they can cut off physical/legal tie from EU, and they should.
The EU has strong legal institutions, and is a democracy ruled by law, with standards at least as good as the US.
They aren't any more hostile to businesses than the US, which has basically identical antitrust laws. Find the list of EU antitrust actions, and you'll see they take actions against EU companies far more often than companies from non-EU countries, almost perfectly aligned with representation in the EU market. You just don't hear about some Italian steel mill being fined in US media.
The hypothetical friendly nation wouldn't be the US, for the reasons you mention.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union_competition_law
Those two (but especially preference) are extremely strong motivators for humans to choose one product over the other.
But even if it wasn't, the law is there the protect the citizens and their livelihoods, not one company's supposed right to hold a monopoly.
There probably needs to a category of consumer software where the argument "but you could always use an alternative" should not apply, when evaluating monopolies. Once you have network effects for example, you have the foundations for a monopoly. WhatsApp is probably a monopoly by now, for example: if all you're friends are using it, you don't really have a choice, even though there are alternatives.
Dominance is reflected by the reality of market share, not by whether or not someone could theoretically switch search engine. In the EU they have a very dominant position (95% I think?).
It's no different from saying MS had an effective monopoly/dominance in the 2000s, even though you could theoretically install Linux.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Competition_law#Dominance_and_...
I not only could, I most certainly did.
The situation was different, though. Microsoft Windows had a kind of real monoply, since it was - and is - difficult to find a retail pc without the damned thing preinstalled and included in the price. No such mechanism exists concerning Google, as long as we politely keep Android out of the picture.
Mind you, my position back then was more or less the same with regard to EU vs MS as it is today, with Google taking over: I dislike both companies. I very much more intensely dislike the monolithic and terrifying EU throwing its weight around.
why do you find the EU terrifying? (also, the EU is not exactly monolithic considering it is not a single entity in many areas, but that is another point entirely).
Economies of scale, network externalities and vertical and horizontal integration means that popular internet services are king of the hill type business. Bigger and larger translates to smaller cost per user, cheaper ads and higher quality. There can be only few really big players and they create natural barriers to entry for anyone else.
All classical barriers of entry apply to Google, FB, Amazon:
* Economies scale production
* Limit pricing
* High set-up costs
* High sunk costs
* Advertising
* brand loyalty
* vertical integration
* horizontal integration
The same way that maps pops up automatically when google search realize that I search for a place (or the weather widget).
Now, I don't use Google shopping very often because in my experience it is meh
Pretty much, you could use the argument you just made against any business that delved into another space. Apple with phones back in the day, Microsoft with Hardware, Walmart and groceries, etc etc etc. There are almost infinite examples, very few businesses haven't expanded their product line and reach. Using their own business to do so is just an obvious solution.
Which monopoly does Amazon have that they're abusing to sell hardware?
> Pretty much, you could use the argument you just made against any business that delved into another space.
Nope; only businesses which are a monopoly.
Amazon has no monopoly, therefore the argument cannot be used against them. Plus nobody is stopping Google from opening a new website (e.g. GoogleShopCompare.com) and doing anything they want, using their huge brand and financial power, what they're saying is wrong is embedding it into their existing monopolistic property to give it an unfair advantage (Google.com).
It is exactly comparable to the Microsoft/Windows issues in the 1990s. Microsoft could sell/give away IE, they just couldn't bundle it with their monopoly (Windows) to give it an unfair advantage. Google previously got into trouble for exactly this due to Google Maps being bundled with Google.com.
Amazon used to only push other's products, now they push their own as well, often making use of their front page to do so. It's the same, if not worse, than what Google is doing.
"Market domination" is in fact defined in the article (and in more specific detail if you follow the links there).
And even if it were about monopoly, whether or not you are forced to use a product or a service is not what determines if it constitutes a monopoly.
Compare the laws here: EU (http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=CELEX:...) US (https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/15/2)
And whether or not you are forced to use a product is a large part of what it means to have a monopoly: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Switching_barriers
Sure those users could use ddg but it's not about what users could do, the reality of the matter is that other comparative shopping sites depend(ed) on google and got cheated.
Well I've seen Google's voice search trigger against people's will on many occasions ;)
I know that wasn't your point, though.
Google fans would like to make this about US vs. the EU, because it misdirects away from Google's illegal actions. But multiple US companies asked for and supported this investigation against Google. And I wish our government laid down the same charges against them here.
Is this just a case of lobbying corruption?
The FTC's staff have previously recommended filing charges against Google, and then the people up the ladder buried it.
Most users don't.
Note, it's not illegal per se. It's not illegal because of a de jure monopoly. It's not even illegal because of the number of users they have. It's illegal because Bing, Yahoo et al are not as relatively successful.
It was the same with browsers. Microsoft were hit for bundling. Apple haven't been though they've done identically the same thing. Why? Because enough people bought Android phones in the EU.
I do find it dubious that, effectively, the primary criteria for illegality is not what the defendant did but what some other actors didn't do. Seems wrong to me.
Random, maybe silly idea. Maybe they could start providing two search streams. One would just be a simpler website search while the other would be a more involved google services search as well as a general website search. This way search users could explicitly say that they want to see direct integrated results from the whole Google ecosystem.
This seems to be the whole point of the fine. Currently Google's services just so damned conveniently integrated that no one uses competitors' services, even if they are better.
The thing is, though, I am totally with you here. I don't want to use one of the other services for maps, or flights, or these snippets for information. They are just search results for me. The integration is more important for me than ... better filtering, or whatnot. I can always go to one of those sites, but there really is no need, And frankly, it would really, really suck if I had to now.
Edit: From the text:
> Google has to apply the same processes and methods to position and display rival comparison shopping services in Google's search results pages as it gives to its own comparison shopping service.
What does that even mean? Right now Google has a link for Maps, Images, Shopping, Videos, ... in the top bar. Do they need to change it to Maps, Images, Shooping (Google), Shopping (Idealo), Shopping (yet another service), ...? Embedding results would not work. Have a link called Shopping that does not list results, but points to more shopping sites, maybe with the search term already preappended? Meh...
Also, I like to draw a line between monopolies imposed by force (eg taxi offering horrible services making competitors illegal through licensing) and those used by people voluntarily because they enjoy the services. Google is used voluntarily, because people enjoy it, like Microsoft during the 90's. As I read elsewhere, Microsoft lost relevance to tech because OSS took servers, web took applications and mobile took the client. Antitrust didn't do much.
With Google, the only thing the EU is doing right now is forcing Google to offer a lower quality service. What should make Google less useful should be innovators making them less relevant and ubiquitous like the web, OSS and mobile did to Microsoft. iOS and Siri already made Google Search much less relevant on mobile, I'm sure there will be more in the future. Monopolies used voluntarily usually don't last long unless they keep innovating, but if they do keep innovating then forcing them to offer lower quality services seems really bad and it doesn't motivate other people to out-innovate them if the government will just help make Google worse, we all lose. Innovation should be bottom up, not top down.
1. They may benefit more from better services. 2. As far as I know Google operates a lot of services which are not profitable by themselfs.
> Also, I like to draw a line between monopolies imposed by force (eg taxi offering horrible services making competitors illegal through licensing) and those used by people voluntarily because they enjoy the services. Google is used voluntarily, because people enjoy it, like Microsoft during the 90's.
Today a lot of people don't know of anything else. The search might even be used voluntarily by many but it's a major information gateway because of its dominance (it's more or less infrastructure). If this is used to cross market other services and even to make competitors harder to find it's a form of mild force. It's a bit like when (in the old days) the major phone company is founding a taxi service and offers you a taxi before calls to competitors are routed through and placing their own service way more prominent inside the phone book.
> iOS and Siri already made Google Search much less relevant on mobile, I'm sure there will be more in the future.
Maybe inside the relatively small Apple world. The mass uses Android where Google makes sure its services stay at the top of everything by forcing all or nothing contracts onto manufactures. They managed to make sure nothing is not an option for most.
> As I read elsewhere, Microsoft lost relevance to tech because OSS took servers, web took applications and mobile took the client.
Microsoft was never that dominant in the server space, Linux and co. mostly replaced the commercial unix offerings. They tried to use their client dominance to push their server OS forward by making it hard for competitors to be compatible, did not work out entirely (and they also got fined by the EU for that later). Web had to be taken from them first, this worked mostly because they got far too lazy with IE (and later a bit of help from, again the EU).
> Antitrust didn't do much.
Antitrust could do more but it is often too slow for the fast world of IT and it is often too weak.
> Monopolies used voluntarily usually don't last long unless they keep innovating,
Microsoft was dominant on the client for over a decade and still is in a lot of areas. It took a long time and a shift to new device categories to partly break that monopoly. And finally what happened is only a shift to a new dominant player called Google.
> unless they keep innovating, but if they do keep innovating then forcing them to offer lower quality services seems really bad and it doesn't motivate other people to out-innovate them if the government will just help make Google worse, we all lose. Innovation should be bottom up, not top down.
They have to innovate a lot less overall. Sure if they do absolutely nothing somebody may beat them regardless but if they do only as much as necessary to keep the friction high enough even innovative competitors are out of luck. Only exceptionally big innovations which are so different to even overwhelm the monopolist have a chance.
So what? Billion dollar companies subsidizing tech for the masses (even selfishly) is not a bad thing. That's one of the best thing about capitalism.
> It's a bit like when (in the old days) the major phone company
No, it's not like that, phone companies were granted monopolies by governments enforced by the law and force of the state. Google is not enforced by the use of government force or law, it's just pleasant to use and so people use it willingly, huge difference.
> this worked mostly because they got far too lazy with IE
You're proving my points, monopolies that are used willingly and not enforced by the government are forced to innovate to survive, if they don't people will check alternatives.
> Microsoft was dominant on the client for over a decade and still is in a lot of areas. It took a long time and a shift to new device categories to partly break that monopoly. And finally what happened is only a shift to a new dominant player called Google.
So a company had a great technology and marketshare that lasted ~15 years only, how is that something to worry about exactly? They had the best tech and grabbed the market until they didn't have the best tech. What's wrong exactly here? Google has the best Search right now and most of the market, if their tech starts lagging, they will lose their marketshare. Again, not seeing the issue here.
> Only exceptionally big innovations which are so different to even overwhelm the monopolist have a chance.
Again, that's exactly my point, trying to bring down monopolies by force only discourages/postpones exceptionally big innovations from happening. Also, Google itself was a huge innovation by itself, why is it a bad thing that only another huge innovation could beat them?
For that matter, Apple only exists today because of Microsoft’s investment, which was in part done only to keep their competitor alive so that they could claim not to have a complete monopoly.
Apple and Google’s products certainly were better, but they would have been crushed by anti-competitive practices if Microsoft had not already lost their antitrust case.
What kind of links they put up is googles decision. If they made a link "Shopping" next to "Maps" and "Images" everything would be fine.
The problem is search results. Consumers expect all results to be shown fairly, by not doing so Google violated it's position.
This is not about linking to products. It's about deceiving the customer.
A "Shopping" link next to "Maps" and "Images" is probably OK, but it's also completely useless. I'd be surprised if more than a fraction of people doing comparison shopping actually clicked that link.
Intentionally pushing down results of competitors via algorithmic criteria is obviously bad, but say they stopped doing that. What about the inline shopping box at the top of search results? That's still putting their own service in a prominent position. Probably bad...
... but then this concern immediately applies to translations, song lyrics, unit conversions, maps, shopping hours, etc. The kind of results that as a user I want to see. Will that be disallowed to? If so, this will make Google Search a significantly worse product.
The point is not that their service was in prominent position, but it was done so that it appeared as natural result of the search.
It's somewhat like doing a search in a search engine and being shown paid results on top, without any indication that they are paid.
From the article the issue is not that Google services appear in the search results, rather it is that they artificially make their own results appear first without regards to normal search algorithms.
"Google has abused this market dominance by giving its own comparison shopping service an illegal advantage. It gave prominent placement in its search results only to its own comparison shopping service, whilst demoting rival services."
ow are they going to fix this now? Show five results, one of which is from Google, four from competitors? Which competitors? How bad can the results be, as long as they are returned by Google's request to their service? Can I exclude competitors? I don't want my data to go to Idealo, for example, I only have an account with Google.
I fear this is just opening a can of worms, becasue ultimately I am searching for something, go to a search engine for this, and want results. If I wanted results from a different search engine, I would have used that one. Now I get mixed results that I did not want to see. Is it really so bad that Google (the search engine) "understands" what I was probably really searching for and offers a specific type of search results - links to shops where I can buy SearchedProduct(tm)?
Here's the thing: they're not really better, because they're not integrated. Google tools tend to suck in many different ways, but their integration usually more than makes up for it.
> The thing is, though, I am totally with you here. I don't want to use one of the other services for maps, or flights, or these snippets for information. They are just search results for me. The integration is more important for me than ... better filtering, or whatnot. I can always go to one of those sites, but there really is no need, And frankly, it would really, really suck if I had to now.
I feel the same way. I described this point further yesterday in AMP thread:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14636642
I am definitely not a Google fanboy; I don’t like Android and I’m not big into their cloud apps, but when it comes to search, they are the best. EU companies could try and compete but they haven’t. Has any EU company tried to build a high quality search experience? If they aren’t succeeding then why?
The problem in France, as I see it is government. As an example, DailyMotion rivaled YouTube for a short time, as soon as DailyMotion was about to be acquired for a huge sum by Yahoo, the French government blocked the sale because Yahoo wasn’t French. That immediately sent a signal that if you put a lot of VC/investment into a French company, your exits were subject to the whims of a protectionist government bureaucracy, which makes investing in French companies relatively more risky than investing in American companies in terms of ROI.
Did the DailyMotion deal contribute to the current Google dominance? I think it definitely had a chilling effect on high growth unicorn chasing in the EU which means the “French Google” hasn’t been born because it is much much harder to access funding than a similarly positioned company in the US. I am not saying the French startup scene is dead or bad, but the ultra-high level moonshots that are fairly common in the US are extremely rare in France because of the bureaucratic environment. Blah Blah Car raises $200 million against a $1.6b valuation, but that is pretty much an outlier and likely the result of an investor play against Uber’s French difficulties.
My point: if the EU wants to prevent monopoly situations, member states ought to be doing more to get out of the way of innovation. They can do that by lowering taxes. Even if you have a winning investment in France, an investor gets butchered in capital gains taxes thus requiring a 10x investment to actually be a 25x investment to be worth it. With such a low hit rate for VCs in general what incentive do they have to kneecap themselves by investing in places like France?
Also, I didn't know DailyMotion was French :) Thanks for that bit of knowledge :)
Of all Google's services I don't care about:
- Google Shopping, I never saw a reason to use it and I never did, I prefer to use local shops or Amazon
- Google Maps, I actually prefer Open Street Maps. The amount of detail on OSM is staggering and in many ways, I think the data is much more complete than Google Maps
- Google reviews about restaurants and businesses, I prefer to use TripAdvisor
- Google Books, I prefer using Amazon and Kobo Store
- Google Flights, I was never able to get anything useful out of this service. I usually use Momondo
As you can see, the only thing that is interesting to me about Google is the search engine and yet, it keeps throwing to my face all these services I don't use and that I don't care about.
Worse, it takes the spotlight from the services I actually use. So yes, this is Microsoft all over again: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend_and_extinguish
This could work through cookies that the browser always makes available to certain or all sites that indicate preferences of the user.
I use Google Shopping for price comparisons across mutliple retailers. (The service was originally named Froogle.) I originally used Pricewatch.com but switched to Froogle/GoogleShopping because it had better results.
Unfortunately, the local shops and Amazon don't offer the same breadth of comparisons. E.g. if I want to buy a new harddrive, Google Shopping tells me whether the lowest price is at Newegg, BHPhoto, or somewhere else.[1]
If there is a superior substitute to Google Shopping, I'd love to know about it.
[1] example: https://www.google.com/shopping/product/3954751729784172026?...
Besides, if you like to use Google Shopping, no one is stopping you.
I have no irrational loyalty to Google Shopping. I was genuinely asking for better price comparison alternatives. Not sure what prompted your petty sniping.
What's the superior European price comparison website you're using that should be ahead of Google Shopping results?
At some point they moved towards Google Checkout (Google Merchant/Wallet?) verification and the number of stores you could actually find with it dropped dramatically.
Now it's just high street retailers, a handful of the bigger online places and eBay. Not only is it not as useful, it's killed off the sites that came before it as they tried to adapt and survive.
So even if you don't believe Google, there's at least some evidence that a lot of people actually do like services showing up.
Yes, and this is exactly what the decision entails, these services should be ranked on their own merit. Google shouldn't be allowed to artificially prioritize their services on searches but let them compete with others.
"It [Google] gave prominent placement in its search results only to its own comparison shopping service, whilst demoting rival services."
While google's tight integration lead to a positive experience for you, it lead to a very poor experience for myself or others who want to use something not google. I'm not asking for the EUC to fine google, I'm asking for choice.
The OP may have been using the Google search results which directly rendered a Google Maps instead of a address link. Not 100% sure either.
Clear down the default intent then
If I buy all my tech at the Apple Store, am I still entitled to a choice among various manufacturers?
I have a similar problem with Google Maps. I don't want it tracking my location history to my Google Account (integration I never asked for), but when I disable this it even refuses to remember my search history for addresses and such (no reason that needs cloud storage except Google wanting to get their hands on this info). Therefore I most often use Open Streetmaps with Maps.me. Which has other advantages too, so it's not all bad.
But honestly, I don't know anyone that is happy with the Google Products service in Germany. They don't even show links to Amazon here, although they often have the best total price (because of free shipping). I even know a lot of people that go directly to Amazon or a price comparison site because the results presented by Google are so crappy.
As results might be different based on country, region and cookie, here is a screenshot comparing idealo (a large price comparison site) with Google Product search (I just picked this specific product randomly): http://imgur.com/a/MByay
But it happened to be part of MS strategy to sideline other browsers, and gain enough power to become the de-facto standard. We got lucky and avoided that, but doing only what's most convenient at any given point in time can be harmful over the longer term. After all, Microsoft at that time tried to established their (patent-covered, binary-blob) .doc as the format for the web, instead of the open HTML.
I can see the same happening with many other products and companies and EU point of view here. I can also see Google's points for making a smoother user experience and getting more money by keeping the users longer in Google web stack. It's not a black and white issue at all, instead a balance must be achieved; USA is more pro-enterprise while EU is more pro-citizen/small company.
You might remember the first notorious case that happened: Internet Explorer. At the top of IE usage, EU started mandating Microsoft to give a choice for its users to use the browser that they prefer. This implied in practical terms that all new systems would ask the user on loading the computer the first time what browser they preferred, with the choices including Opera and Firefox.
What do they want to force Google to do now, prohibit being able to advertise on their own platform? give their competitors priority placement for free? How many rival comparison services do they need to show now? There could be hundreds popping up to take advantage of the forced exposure with scam and ad-ridden pages. Does Google have to show them all? Who decides? Will this ruling extend to all other relevant content Google shows around Search results?
Guess we'll have to see, but this ruling could force Google to provide a degraded Customer experience which I guess is one way to make their Services less appealing and allow competition to catch up.
By following the rules & regulations set out, which Google will have been fully aware of. This is explained in the link and should not have required calling it "ridiculous". I also disagree it wasn't previously known to be illegal unless you can show something has been applied retroactively (so a law created in 2008 or later).
> The Commission's fine of €2 424 495 000 takes account of the duration and gravity of the infringement. In accordance with the Commission's 2006 Guidelines on fines (see press release and MEMO), the fine has been calculated on the basis of the value of Google's revenue from its comparison shopping service in the 13 EEA countries concerned.
http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_IP-06-857_en.htm?locale...
http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_MEMO-06-256_en.htm?loca...
http://ec.europa.eu/competition/antitrust/legislation/fines....
> What do they want to force Google to do now
> The Commission Decision requires Google to stop its illegal conduct within 90 days of the Decision and refrain from any measure that has the same or an equivalent object or effect. In particular, the Decision orders Google to comply with the simple principle of giving equal treatment to rival comparison shopping services and its own service:
> Google has to apply the same processes and methods to position and display rival comparison shopping services in Google's search results pages as it gives to its own comparison shopping service.
Doesn't mean they have to show terrible shopping pages, they just have to compete with them on an even footing rather than pushing every other comparison site back to almost nowhere in the results.
There was no previous ruling that indicated that displaying their own relevant content on their own Search pages was illegal. It's absurd to think displaying relevant content in the context of what the User is searching for is illegal, or that they should've been investing resources in helping their competitors get more exposure.
These shackles on User Experience are going to give Amazon and Bing an advantage who aren't limited in their ability to provide integrated services or forced competitor placement.
> Doesn't mean they have to show terrible shopping pages, they just have to compete with them on an even footing rather than pushing every other comparison site back to almost nowhere in the results.
Are they going to be able to charge for prominent placement or do competitors get it for free? If there was an Auction Google could just outbid everyone since they're going to keep the bulk of the revenue, which they're unlikely going to be allowed to do, so if they're not forced to give prominent placement for free, they're going to have to charge an amount they wont be able to bid for themselves.
Previous anti-trust rulings seem pretty similar to me. If microsoft gets into trouble for making IE a default browser or bundling windows media player, I'm really not surprised with the way this went.
> It's absurd to think displaying relevant content in the context of what the User is searching for is illegal
It's not absurd to think that using your dominance in a market to heavily push people towards your own other services is illegal.
The Commission also note that it's not just the relevance of the link, but the position that makes a big difference.
> b) Furthermore, the effects cannot just be explained by the fact that the first result is more relevant because evidence also shows that moving the first result to the third rank leads to a reduction in the number of clicks by about 50%.
Since the introduction, it massively increased click-throughs to their already available service, with a corresponding huge decrease to competitors.
Was their own service good?
> Contemporary evidence from Google shows that the company was aware that Froogle's market performance was relatively poor (one internal document from 2006 stated "Froogle simply doesn't work").
So to be clear the problem is that they had a pretty naff service, which when treated similarly to other players lost out. They then promoted it far above other results, resulting in a huge shift towards them and away from their competitors. They did not compete by making the service better, but by using their huge dominance in one market to step into another and significantly harm the other players.
What other Website do you know has been penalized for showing their own content and are being forced to give their competitors prominence? Microsoft had a 95%+ Monopoly on Desktop Operating Systems and wouldn't allow you to remove IE, anyone can easily go to amazon.com, bing.com, ebay.com or visit any other website to do their shopping if they prefer to.
In which case, quite possibly, if
* amazon can be argued to have a very large position, with the vast majority of searches going through it
* it can be shown that people tend to click almost exclusively on the first or first few links
* they are treating their own, different, service more favourably than competitors (and remember when in the context of google, it's how people would find the competitors in the first place)
* you can see them having hugely increased sales for their own product after the introduction, and massively decreased sales for other people
But then my understanding of the regulations comes largely from the links here.
Fundamentally though, if you're big enough to be concerned about this you should be able to afford the legal teams to figure this out or approach the commission to discuss what is and is not within the regulations.
I also just searched for "aaa batteries" and the first hit, after the AmazonBasics ad, were AmazonBasics batteries.
I'm not saying either of these are anti-competitive. I understand that more goes into it than just that. Just offering these little facts in case anyone else is curious.
(I do think that with both Amazon's increasing dominance and seemingly increasing aggressiveness, they're heading for legal issues).
(1) https://www.recode.net/2016/5/31/11826394/amazon-apple-tv-go...
Then they would investigate if they abuse this dominance to stifle competition. Which I think your batteries example would qualify for. They'd probably look a bit further though because I dunno, if it's just batteries :-p So they'd gather more evidence and if they find enough, they too will get an antitrust case.
Just that, market dominance in itself is not illegal, so if Amazon, unlike Google (knowingly!!) did, uses that dominance responsibly, no problem.
What I got from the article, the investigation has been very reasonable and it's beyond doubt that Google went way over the line.
People may question whether this EU regulation is right (but I believe it is), but from the looks of it, at least it's fair: With great market dominance comes great responsibility.
Except this has created quite the slippery slope. What's stopping the EU from deciding it's unfair for a search engine to have it's own maps served prominently when searching an address? What's stopping the EU from deciding it's unfair for Google to provide reverse image search through it's webtool (you used to have to go to tineye if you wanted that)?
You can pretty much apply this ruling to every Google product that is not their basic, text, search engine. It seems like Google is on the edge of simply being classified a utility in the EU.
Are the rivals going to be required to show google results now or is this really not about choice but about crippling google or is it about extracting an easy multi-billion dollar payday?
When I go to the SNCF (French rail) website, are they showing me flight and bus options or only their train results?
Nobody is forcing anyone to visit google. It’s a website. Perhaps if the EU really cared, they’d ask themselves why Europe hasn’t produced a credible Google rival.
That settlement money ought to go directly to funding EU startups. Instead it will likely make its way into CAP agricultural subsidies. The Common Agricultural Policy is about 35% of the entire EU budget despite supporting an industry that that is just 1.6% of EU GDP. It’s clear that the EU prioritizes some industries over others and then they wring their hands when American tech becomes ubiquitous.
> Google has demoted rival comparison shopping services in its search results: rival comparison shopping services appear in Google's search results on the basis of Google's generic search algorithms. Google has included a number of criteria in these algorithms, as a result of which rival comparison shopping services are demoted. Evidence shows that even the most highly ranked rival service appears on average only on page four of Google's search results, and others appear even further down. Google's own comparison shopping service is not subject to Google's generic search algorithms, including such demotions.
There is nothing wrong with Google's integration. The complaint is that Google unfairly promotes its own services at the expense of rivals. When I search for something, I expect the search results displayed to be relevant and fair. I have no problem with Google having that sponsored Google Shopping ad, but demoting other highly relevant results to the fourth page is highly anti-competitive and downright unfair. How many times in the last week have you actually flipped through 4 pages of Google Search results?
They were really not.
For every search you assume you will be given the more popular matches, what they were doing was purposefully bypassing their own algorithm to their advantage, giving doctored results.
There wouldn't have been any problem if they promoted their service making it clear it was not part of the search results.
EDIT: For a counterexample, google "flights price compare".
You will be shown a small form at the top from which you can use their own service.
It is clearly separated from the search results, which show the actual most popular websites for flight comparison.
Where did you get this from?
Google has demoted rival comparison shopping services in its search results: rival comparison shopping services appear in Google's search results on the basis of Google's generic search algorithms. Google has included a number of criteria in these algorithms, as a result of which rival comparison shopping services are demoted. Evidence shows that even the most highly ranked rival service appears on average only on page four of Google's search results, and others appear even further down. Google's own comparison shopping service is not subject to Google's generic search algorithms, including such demotions."
> Google has included a number of criteria in these algorithms, as a result of which rival comparison shopping services are demoted.
Sounds like a jump to conclude they were doctoring results from "they modify their ranking algorithms".
" Evidence shows that even the most highly ranked rival service appears on average only on page four of Google's search results, and others appear even further down. Google's own comparison shopping service is not subject to Google's generic search algorithms, including such demotions."
While it may be the case that today, Google likes to pile all these things into one integrated product (the user benefit of this being really debatable, even if you personally like it), their market dominance was initially acquired from their web search.
If they had historically always been demoting other shopping sites in favour of their own, they would probably not have gotten this dominant at all. One of the features that set Google apart from the other big search engines in its early days was in fact very similar: Other engines would sell rankings and other tricks often favouring profit over relevance. Google didn't do this, partially out of "principle" (which is apparently lost now), partially because their pagerank algorithm was so superior in ranking for relevance that they didn't need to. If they had only returned results for their own shopping business, it wouldn't have gained nearly as much support and wouldn't have been as successful.
But because of this established market dominance, they can get away with it today, because everything is integrated, people just google stuff, even if shopping results are heavily skewed towards their own. And not only does this obscure competition, the competition that does appear far down really sucks, and now you have people arguing that Google Shopping is actually in fact better. Google's web search has deteriorated in quality quite a bit, especially for queries related to "integrated Google products", which makes sense because why bother sorting out a web filled with spam for the good bits (like they used to work very hard at) if you can just push your own product instead?
Finally, regardless of whether Google likes to integrate and pile everything into one heap, Online Shopping and Web Search are different markets.
That's the whole point of this antitrust, just because different businesses in different markets can be grouped under one huge company, doesn't mean it can abuse its market dominance in one market to stifle competition in another.
They have a dominant position in many markets.
What actually happened was that Google removed the need to compete with anyone, by always listing its own other businesses up-front in search results. Since Google has the dominant position in the search market, this guarantees a steady stream of customers to the other businesses, even if they're not as good as other companies' products/services, and means they don't face competitive pressure. Without competitive pressure, quality doesn't get driven up and prices don't get driven down.
Since we want competitive markets to drive quality up and prices down, we have laws which don't allow a company that dominates one type of product/service to use that as a way to achieve dominance in other products/services by avoiding the need to compete.
Yes, apparently they do show bus results. Both from their own bus company and at least one seemingly unrelated one. I know it is similar in Sweden with SJ, which shows trains and buses from other companies.
> Nobody is forcing anyone to visit google. It’s a website. Perhaps if the EU really cared, they’d ask themselves why Europe hasn’t produced a credible Google rival.
Isn't that essentially what they are doing? It might be to late to compete on web search. That doesn't mean Google should have an unfair advantage in other search like price comparison.
> That settlement money ought to go directly to funding EU startups.
Most EU startups will be happy if they just have a chance to compete "pound for pound". US companies have been enjoying single digit VAT and corporate income tax for years. Which is both the result of EU laws and the US leaving their own "loopholes" open to make their companies more competitive.
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-tax-checkthebox-insigh...